Mario Kart 8 was a pretty game when it was on the Wii U. Have a guess how nice it looks at full pelt in 8K.
A video of Baby Luigi nipping around a couple of tracks was uploaded recently, with the user playing the game through the latest version of the CemU emulator (1.9.0c). Running on a i7-6700K (clock speed not mentioned) with a GTX 1080 Ti, the footage is supersampled from 8K down to 4K, which helps because 4K is the maximum playback resolution for YouTube anyway.
We’ve already seen a bunch of Wii U games running with 4K graphics packs on an older version of CemU. The emulator has been optimised a bunch since then, as all the progress videos for Breath of the Wild has shown.
For what it’s worth, the action seems relatively smooth. If you watch closely you can see the odd frame rate drop here and there, but the motion is pretty steady regardless. No word whether it’d hold up as smoothly under splitscreen conditions, but the fact that an emulator can happily play something in 8K at all with consumer grade hardware (albeit top of the line, if not close to) is neat.
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3 responses to “Good Morning, Here’s Mario Kart 8 In 8K”
now this is what nintendo should be doing in-house
their engines and games are a perfect fit for high res graphics and will do 60fps
I would have a lot of respect for them if they did it. Also its good for VR
I’ve got no doubt internally they would be producing 4K assets and renders for presentations and prototypes, but it’s so far beyond the capacity of their hardware that you’d never see it on a consumer level.
Speaking of Mario Kart VR, I’ll have more on that soon. (Today or tomorrow.)
The Switch being what it is (a truly portable console) is what made it successful. Do you think that it would have had that same success by simply being yet another shiny brick capable of processing large amount of polygons and filling as many pixels as the 1% of TVs in consumers’ homes can display? If you have a PS4 (or an XBONE, I guess), why would you require yet another similar machine other than to play the exclusive Nintendo games?