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At least aesthetically speaking, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild received a lot of praise when it was released on the Wii U and Nintendo Switch.
The graphics quality itself is now considered outdated at the latest – that's what the modder Digital Dreams, who regularly appears on YouTube with impressive showcases for various games, probably thought.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 shows how beautiful Breath of the Wild can look with ray tracing and revised shaders.
Link to YouTube content
The video, recorded in 8K resolution (7,680 x 4,320 pixels), takes us, among other things, through the lost forests, the village of Zora and the sea of Phirone.
The latter area in particular shows the capabilities of ray tracing and the revised shaders in all their glory. The reshade presets themselves are so far only available via the Digital Dreams Ko-Fi page available.
The PC hardware required to let Breath of the Wild shine in this 8K splendor is of course quite impressive and logically beats the Nintendo Switch (and probably its successor) by far:
- processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
- motherboard: Gigabyte Aorus X670 AX
- graphic card: Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090
- random access memory: 32 GB DDR5-6000 RAM
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What is 4K and do you need 8K?
Now there is another one at this point Legal notice appropriate – Breath of the Wild was never released for the PC, so Digital Dreams probably uses an emulator for the showcase.
The use of such an emulator is not illegal in and of itself – but 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 “just” put the files on your PC, you can still 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, a wave of complaints rolled across the emulator landscape: