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Super Mario 64 gets ported to PC with DirectX 12 and ray-tracing support: doesn't need an RTX 2080 Ti but it still looks...like an N64 game

Nintendo's mascot, clearly feeling too old for this (Image source: Nintendo)
Nintendo's mascot, clearly feeling too old for this (Image source: Nintendo)
An intrepid modder built a DirectX 12 port of Nintendo classic Super Mario 64 for the PC. Using ReShade and its ray-tracing plugin, they were even able to get ray-traced global illumination working.
Gaming Console Desktop

Modder and YouTuber Unreal showcased what appears to be a native port of Super Mario 64 running on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K PC. Using the ReShade suite and Pascal Gilcher's ray-tracing plugin, the modder even enabled ray-traced global illumination in-game. 

The port is built using the DirectX 12 API and appears to feature all levels from the Nintendo 64 original. Nintendo will undoubtedly go after the creator and distributors of the (very) unofficial project: consequently, links to the source files are hard to come by. 

While ReShade MXAO and ray-traced global illumination technically work in the Super Mario 64 port, asset quality is simply far too low to provide a meaningfully better experience.

We don't expect Nintendo to start releasing its back catalog on PC anytime soon. However, if you have a taste for older console games, the Master Chief Collection brings remastered versions of every Halo game apart from Halo 5: Guardians to PC. 

Source(s)

WCCFTech

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2020 05 > Super Mario 64 gets ported to PC with DirectX 12 and ray-tracing support: doesn't need an RTX 2080 Ti but it still looks...like an N64 game
Arjun Krishna Lal, 2020-05- 5 (Update: 2020-05- 5)