Pascal Gilcher's ReShade ray tracing/path tracing mod is all the rage even in its Alpha stage, where it's currently only available to his Patreon supporters of the 'Book' tier ($20 monthly or more).
We've seen it in action with results ranging from good to excellent in high-profile PC games like The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Grand Theft Auto V, Dark Souls III and Assassin's Creed Odyssey. However, given the nature of the postprocessing injector ReShade, it was immediately clear this could be effectively applied even to games that weren't originally made for PC. A couple of weeks ago YouTuber EiermannTelevision posted a video of Demon's Souls running on the RPCS3 emulator with ray tracing enabled, proving that was indeed the case.
We discussed this with YouTuber BSoD Gaming, whose videos on Wii U emulation through Cemu have made it on Wccftech plenty of times in the past. We thought all those titles could benefit from ray tracing, even in this limited screen-space-only implementation devised by Pascal Gilcher that can be added to virtually all games (as long as they allow depth buffer access) through ReShade.
BSoD Gaming came through yesterday and posted a showcase of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 with ray tracing enabled. All of the games immediately look a lot better and thanks to the fact all three now run very well through Cemu, the performance hit is affordable on a high-end PC gaming system.
In case you're wondering, below are the specifications of the PC BSoD Gaming used while capturing this footage.
- i7 8700k @5.0Ghz
- 16gb DDR4 3200Mhz RAM
- GTX 1080 Ti 11gb
- 256gb NVME M.2 SSD
Is there an old game in particular you think might benefit from ReShade based ray tracing? Let us know in the comments!
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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