The Nintendo Switch Pro might one day be able to play Breath of the Wild at 4K (with Nvidia DLSS technology helping it along) but it won't ever be capable of 8K. Fortunately, modern gaming PCs running the Wii U version of the game through the CEMU emulator can, and they can even do it with ray traced lighting enabled too. In a new video from Digital Dreams, we get to see just how gorgeous Breath of the Wild can be when its visuals are turned up to 11.
The Wii U version of the game has a much more robust emulator to fall back on, hence the use of it for this project. It also leverages the RTGI shader for its ray tracing global illumination, which isn't quite the same as Nvidia's RTX solution, but it does work very well indeed without too much of a performance overhead — which is why 8K is possible at the same time. It also leverages the REVO Reshade Redux mod which helps smooth out the edges of the art style and some of the artifacts that crop up with path traced lighting.
Considering the hardware makeup of Nintendo consoles, it's unlikely we'll ever see Breath of the Wild this good run natively on its systems, and it may well be at least another two Nintendo console generations before any potential sequel could look this good. But a boy can dream, right?
Or emulate. He can just emulate.