Switch emulation on PC opens up doors to mod certain games with graphical enhancements. We have seen this across the board already. For example, last year, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet received a 60fps mod on PC to address the performance issues seen on the Switch hardware. Today, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has received an impressive raytracing mod which turns the game into something even more magical.
Of course, we don’t support emulation here on the site. If you want to emulate the game, you should support the developers and purchase it first. Then you can find ways to transfer your game license to PC in order to legally play it. Still, the question of “How legal is this?” still remains.
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The benefit of emulation means games run better on the PC than on the Switch. It also opens up opportunities to install custom mods and graphical tweaks onto games. One of which is the latest raytracing skin on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom.
Someone tweaked a custom version of REVO ReShade 6.0 which was originally a preset used for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. Given that Tears of The Kingdom and Breath of The Wild are similar games running on the same engine, the shader worked and the result is quite impressive.
The user managed to get Tears of the Kingdom running with this raytracing tweak at 1440p 60FPS on an RTX 3080 Mobile GPU. Sure, there are some technical issues here and there such as dropped frame rates but the general visual showcase is impressive.
The raytracing adds some bright shaders to lights which cause shadows to bounce around the scene. The general lighting across the game is also stunning with dark and light areas accurately rendered. You can also see how the shadows are drastically improved thanks to the lighting.
Of course, it is not perfect. There are some parts in the video where you can see the engine breaking and rendering the original game lighting. But again, this is a rework of an old REVO ReSharde 6.0 mod so it will only improve with time.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom is out now on Switch. Check out our full review of the game here. We also unboxed the Switch OLED console here and all the accessories and Collector’s Edition here.
