The Switch may have breathed new life into handheld gaming and hardware sales for Nintendo, but the hybrid platform is certainly limited in terms of its performance. And there's no better way to show how limited it is than running a greatly-enhanced The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild through an emulator on PC.
As Kotaku reports, a modder who goes by the name Digital Dreams on YouTube has enhanced Nintendo's highly-rated Zelda game so that it runs at 8K with ray tracing using the Cemu Wii U emulator. Remember, Breath of the Wild received releases on both the Wii U and the Switch back in 2017.
You can see the beautiful results below:
As you'd expect, Digital Dreams has a very nice gaming rig on which to run the game at such a high resolution. It uses a Ryzen 9 3900X running at 4.5GHz, Asus Prime x470 Pro motherboard, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz RAM, an Asus TUF RTX 3090 graphics card, and a Crucial MX500 2TB SSD.
We'll never see the original game looking like this and running at 8K on the Switch, the inevitable Switch Pro, or even the handheld that comes after that I'd bet. And I'm sure Nintendo will be far from happy seeing one of its system-selling games appearing in a form it simply can't match on official hardware. At least we can look forward to the game on a slightly larger and more color-rich OLED display come Oct. 8.