It’s not much consolation for everyone who can’t afford the hardware, but for those that can? Breath of the Wild at 8K is where it’s at.
You know all the usual caveats here: obviously, Breath of the Wild is not officially out on PC and will probably never make the jump. People are only playing the game through the use of the CEMU emulator, which obviously opens up all sorts of liabilities and moral quandaries that you can grapple with for yourself.
Now while this isn’t the first time the game has run at 8K — CEMU was capable of downsampling from 8K a few years ago — the state of CEMU, PC hardware and all the texture packs and reshade mods has come a long way. Hell, it’s in a spot where you can run the game with ray-tracing, which makes it look about as good as any next-gen game on the market. (The ray tracing is actually the ReShade Ray Tracing Shader from Pascal Gilcher, so it’s not quite the same implementation as the ray-tracing used in games today, but the improvement is impressive enough.)
And no, I’m not joking around with that. Here’s one of the game’s night time scenes. It’s dark, but just look at how much detail and draw distance there is, even without the benefit of something like HDR.
And this beautiful segment through the forest, which is just adorable.
But it’s the daytime moments that really sing, especially as you head off into the sun.
If your PC / browser can handle it, crank the resolution on Digital Dreams‘ video below to 8K and enjoy Breath of the Wild the way it should be. People joke about whether computers, tablets, smart watches and fridges can run Crysis, but bugger that. The swaying of that grass as the light hits the edges, Link’s slow steps towards doom and the soft soundtrack in the background: that’s the good stuff.
If you want some more jaw dropping moments, the channel also has a killer video of what The Witcher looks like with a metric ton of addons, ray-tracing Reshade tweaks and the excellent Immersive Lighting 2.0 mod. You’d need a $3000-plus graphics card to make it happen, but hey, what a game.
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