Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Mod Adds Ray-Tracing And It Looks Ridiculously Good

Of the various technological innovations in gaming over the last decade, ray-tracing has definitely been one of the most mind-blowing. Although we're probably a long way away from Nintendo officially supporting ray-tracing, one modder has found a way to get it running on an emulated version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild--and the results are unbelievable.

As reported by Kotaku, German modder Digital Dreams created a ray-tracing preset with Reshade for the PC-emulated version of the game. They also bumped up draw distances and improved depth of field. As you can see in the embed below, Breath of the Wild running at 8K resolution with all these bells and whistles looks gorgeous. If you have a 4K (or better) monitor, we highly recommend putting this video in full screen, bumping up the resolution, and immersing yourself.

Digital Dreams has found a niche in giving a new, ray-traced coat of paint to all sorts of games, from Crysis 3 to Just Cause 3. There's just something different about ray-tracing on a game that'll almost certainly never be officially released on a platform that natively supports the feature, though. Of course, it's worth saying that this PC version of the game is illegal, so user beware.

Meanwhile, Nintendo is still at work on a Breath of the Wild sequel, which is coming sometime in 2022. Most recently, Nintendo unveiled a new trailer for the game at E3 2021. You can check out a roundup of everything we know about the Breath of the Wild sequel here.