The modder Digital Dreams has dedicated itself to a new project: Breath of the Wild looks more beautiful than perhaps ever before in 8K resolution and with ray tracing
Aesthetically at least, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild received a lot of praise when it was released on the Wii U and Nintendo Switch.
However, the graphics quality itself is likely to be considered outdated nowadays at the latest – as modder Digital Dreams, who regularly appears on YouTube with impressive showcases for various games, probably thought.
From Cyberpunk 2077 to Minecraft Digital Dreams has already uploaded some beautiful 8K videos; now the YouTuber is showing just how beautiful Breath of the Wild can look with ray tracing and reworked shaders.
The video, recorded in 8K resolution (7,680 x 4,320 pixels), takes us through the lost forests, the village of the Zora and the sea of Phirone, among other places.
The latter area in particular shows the capacities of ray tracing and the revised shaders in all their glory. The reshade presets themselves are currently only available via the Digital Dreams Ko-Fi site.
The PC hardware required to make Breath of the Wild shine in this 8K splendor is, of course, quite something and logically beats the Nintendo Switch (and probably its successor) by far:
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
- Mainboard: Gigabyte Aorus X670 AX
- Graphics card: Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090
- Memory: 32 GByte DDR5-6000 RAM
A legal note is appropriate at this point – Breath of the Wild was never released for the PC, so Digital Dreams is probably using an emulator for the showcase.
Using such an emulator is not illegal in and of itself – however, you are at least in a legal gray area.
Games may not be emulated without the consent of the rights holder. Even if you own the original game and “only” transfer the files to your PC, you could be liable to prosecution.
Nintendo in particular does not treat the developers of such software squeamishly. Shortly after the release of the BotW sequel Tears of the Kingdom, for example, a wave of lawsuits rolled across the emulator landscape:
Now we need your opinion: What do you think of the 8K mod of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? Would you like to be able to optionally play games with ray tracing on the upcoming Switch console or do you think the technology is superfluous for Nintendo games? Let us know in the comments below
