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Super Mario 64 with RTX

Wonder if they can ever get the game to look close to the renders.
Eme5TBn.jpg
 
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I wonder what MK8 deluxe would look like fully ray traced? I am blown away every time that I play it on my switch. It already looks amazing
 
It's beautiful and I hate it lol. Has a weird feel to the visuals my nostalgia brain can't overcome.
 
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Maybe I'm in the minority, but the addition of RTX here, while impressive, doesn't look good with the art style. It looks really disjointed.
 
Looks surprisingly good. Reminds me of old school 3d tech demos. It looks impressive in the way that N64 games looked impressive to me back then when I first saw them 25 years ago. Does that make sense? I actually prefer this weird clash of low poly/RT over the visual style of Odyssey( Which is not to say that Odyssey looks bad.).
 
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game looks awesome with rtx....ppl who complain should complain about how ugly mario 64 is not rtx...game looks amazing with rtx, dont see how it can look worse..
 
Sejan said:
Maybe I'm in the minority, but the addition of RTX here, while impressive, doesn't look good with the art style. It looks really disjointed.
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I'm gonna have to agree with this. Everytime I see these RTX added videos it generally just looks bad. Like when everybody was posting ENB videos and everything was just soaking wet. Or when people make Zelda in Unreal Engine, just no.
 
Beautiful, love this! With some ambient occlusion (bounce lighting) it would be chefs kiss.

Now hopefully it will eventually come to Zelda oot and mm, fzero, Diddy kong racing... but unlikely coz theyre not ported to pc like mario64.
 


Mario 64 ported to PC with real Ray Tracing running better than I expected on my Radeon RX 6750 XT

I did I had to roll my Radeon drivers back to 24.4.1 (from 2024!) to get it to render properly but other than that it works surprisingly well. It never crashed on me once while playing for over an hour and if I turn off RTGI and denoiser it runs over 30 FPS at 1440p.

Honestly this is impressive once you get it all figured out. But getting it running (using SM64PCBuildler2) can be very confusing at first. You'll need to install MSys2 before you can even start and there's a lot of options you'll need to know including what distro (port/fork) to choose, what renderer to use, what options, cheats, models and texture packs to install all before providing your own SM64 N64 ROM file and compiling an exe to run. One miss-checked option could spell disaster and you'll need to recompile (takes 3-10 minutes or more depending on your CPU) so having a good guide is key. The website for SM64PCBuilder2 has virtually no information to help you. I didn't even know what distro to start with and if you want the Ray Tracing you have to use a very specific one and the right renderer too. Not to mention some of the important options that are buried in sub menus. Luckily I found a video to explain it all.

Watch the video below for step by step instructions on how to compile your own version today!
Click to expand...
 
Sejan said:
Maybe I'm in the minority, but the addition of RTX here, while impressive, doesn't look good with the art style. It looks really disjointed.
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You're not alone. RTX in older games always looks strange and clashes with the art style.
 
Cool, but:
- good job picking the worst level in the game for the video,
- it's not better than the original.

I hope I live to see the day when people can admit, there's a thing called artstyle and putting RTX on it doesn't necessarily make it better. Quite the contrary, actually.
 
Ray tracing has killed the bright, eye pleasing, vibrant colors. It would have looked better with a modern art style like that super mario remaster; ray tracing doesn't really suit this one.
 
euroboi said:
It looks alright, but kind of stale. Dull, even.
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I know what you mean. That "dry/dull" look often happens when low detail assets are rendered in high resolutions. It's f.ex. a common issue when vectorizing pixel art, it just ends up looking "off". That's why many of us prefer using old-school filters when playing ports like these.

Also, SM64 is "tuned" to look like it does in the absence of "lighting", with f.ex. hard painted speculars on textures. The charm just evaporates when something else is glued on top of it...
 
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nemiroff said:
I know what you mean. That "dry/dull" look often happens when low detail assets are rendered in high resolutions. It's f.ex. a common issue when vectorizing pixel art, it just ends up looking "off". That's why many of us prefer using old-school filters when playing ports like these.

Also, SM64 is "tuned" to look like it does in the absence of "lighting", with f.ex. hard painted speculars on textures. The charm just evaporates when something else is glued on top of it...
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Yeah, exactly, trying to improve something and it ends up looking worse instead.
 
IbizaPocholo said:
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I think Render96 + RT is a good combination. It brings the whole thing closer to that specific vision they are going for (love it or hate it, it aims for a specific look, not just a random "better looking" version).

It also generally looks so much better than any Unreal Engine fan project because it's razor sharp, colorful and clean, without all the motion blur, stutters, crappy exposure and bloom.

But i'm not going to go through all that to make it work. Someone must upload a portable version.
 
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In the latest video Mario looks like a shiny plastic doll with 5 o clock shadow.

Mato said:
Looks surprisingly good. Reminds me of old school 3d tech demos. It looks impressive in the way that N64 games looked impressive to me back then when I first saw them 25 years ago. Does that make sense? I actually prefer this weird clash of low poly/RT over the visual style of Odyssey( Which is not to say that Odyssey looks bad.).
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Makes a lot of sense. Odyssey to me as a broad snapshot looks a mess. Too many textures and too much going on visually.
 
apple_of_enlightenment said:
Odyssey to me as a broad snapshot looks a mess. Too many textures and too much going on visually.
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IMO Odyssey just looks odd to me because it has a very inconsistent art style. Like how Mario is a human but still doesn't look like he is from the same universe as the other humans in the city level. Or how some objects use realistic textures and some look more cartoony. And also, the realistic T-Rex.

It's like the mix of random assets you see in some fan made projects, but with the skills and budget of Nintendo.
 
nkarafo said:
IMO Odyssey just looks odd to me because it has a very inconsistent art style. Like how Mario is a human but still doesn't look like he is from the same universe as the other humans in the city level. Or how some objects use realistic textures and some look more cartoony. And also, the realistic T-Rex.

It's like the mix of random assets you see in some fan made projects, but with the skills and budget of Nintendo.
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Yep. I don't know if they just had too many polygons to play with or there was too much pressure on them to make it look 'HD' but the simplicity of the N64 trumps it visually. Now 3D World I thought was better at maintaining an overall coherent artstyle throughout, unlike Odyssey, but it's just a bit too sterile. Very hard position Nintendo is in to innovate graphically on 3D Mario.
 
This one is great. Dariosamo is a real one for this.

Digital Foundry did great coverage of this a few years back IIRC.
 
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