The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is gorgeous in 8K with ray tracing

[Shawn Knight]

Editor's take: More than anything, a demonstration like this shows the potential of a game such as Breath of the Wild with cutting-edge technology applied. Perhaps one day, Nintendo will release a remastered version of the game on a future machine that approaches this level of fluidity.

Even now, more than four years after its launch, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BOTW) remains one of the most visually impressive games on the Nintendo Switch. As we’ve seen before, the game has lots of potential when you step beyond the limitations of the modestly-powered Switch.

That fact is on display once again courtesy of Digital Dreams. The YouTube channel has put together a stunning demonstration of the game running at up to 8K resolution with ray tracing. How’s this wizardry possible, you ask?

Digital Dreams is using the Wii U version of BOTW and an emulator called Cemu to play the game on PC.

As you might have suspected, powerful hardware is also needed to obtain this level of eye candy. The test system this footage was captured on consists of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, an Asus TUF RTX 3090 and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance memory.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/88975-legend-zelda-breath-wild-gorgeous-8k-ray-tracing.html

 

[yRaz]

Looks better than crysis....

 

[Nobina]

Looks good but not amazing. They should've made a comparison between RT off and on. Don't see where it makes a difference.


I managed to run this in CEMU a coupe of years ago, didn't commit cause I got annoyed at the puzzles in the beginning but it looks like a decent game.

 

[LuckyMenace]

Beat this game on the Switch. 720p on sub-30 FPS is definitely not the best way to play this game but it was still a fun game

 

[Experimentongod]

It's a shitty ReShade filter, also the video is 60fps but the performance is nowhere near that mark so it looks terrible in motion.

 

[polord]

I play this also with cemu, 60 frames and 4 k. But no raytrace, euhh how?

 

[JerseyXS97]

Never been a fan of the art style present in Breath of the Wild, and unfortunately screen-space ray-tracing doesn't change that. Even in Cemu it's just not a good looking game in a lot of areas imo

 

[Markoni35]

Some weird rendering artifacts on the distant mountains.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I'm sure that it does look gorgeous at 8K with ray-tracing. I'm also sure that it looks gorgeous at 8K without ray-tracing. I fail to see the point of this article other that being a commercial that's trying to push ray-tracing technology.

Telling us that something looks amazing with ray-tracing doesn't tell us anything. Comparing it to non-ray-traced is the correct way to write an article like this. Nobody has ever said that ray-tracing didn't look good because it does. It's just that a lot of us find that the difference is so slight as to be either unnoticeable altogether or just not worth the hit in price and performance.

Shawn Knight is a fantastic writer, he should know better.

 

[LuckyMenace]

I'm sure that it does look gorgeous at 8K with ray-tracing. I'm also sure that it looks gorgeous at 8K without ray-tracing. I fail to see the point of this article other that being a commercial that's trying to push ray-tracing technology.

Telling us that something looks amazing with ray-tracing doesn't tell us anything. Comparing it to non-ray-traced is the correct way to write an article like this. Nobody has ever said that ray-tracing didn't look good because it does. It's just that a lot of us find that the difference is so slight as to be either unnoticeable altogether or just not worth the hit in price and performance.

Shawn Knight is a fantastic writer, he should know better.

Pushing? Commercial? What does the writer stand to gain? Who’s making money here?