Random: Super Mario 64 Gets A Ray Tracing Makeover Thanks To Fan Mod

Aaaahh, it looks too gorgeous.

That’s extraordinary, the water surface looks amazing. I’d like to see it fleshed out further & extended to the rest of the game..

So beautiful.
Oh so beautiful

This is pretty hideous. The combination of realistic effects and low poly models is just... ugh.

Very “Nintendo, hire this man” stuff.

Mario 64 in widescreen? Blasphemy!

I don't like it, it looks too realistic looking for Mario (a problem I had with certain design choices in Mario Odyssey too)

The problem with many of these fan mods is that it deters away from Nintendo's intended art style. Realism isn't always the answer to best quality games, despite how beautiful it looks in a certain way.

That doesn't impress me much. Wake me up when somebody makes the game run on the Playstation 2's Emotion Engine. Now that is groundbreaking technology.

Maybe one day we’ll get a high def remake of 64 on one of Nintendo’s future consoles! Hope so...

Graphically, this is like putting spoilers on Datsun. Breaking the aesthetics.

@Ganner it got ported to PS2 a while back too.

Very mixed comments here

Here comes copyright.

I wish metal Mario was playing to see that shine. Have they done any control modification to have Mario move more streamlined or with a better camera

I actually quite like the ‘retro but curiously luminescent’ aesthetic. Normally fan-made HD remakes of classic games send me right up the uncanny valley, but I didn’t find this particularly jarring (which admittedly surprised me). Clearly not a universally held view, but that’s fine because we’re all different and all special.
☆〜Sparkles ray-tracingly〜☆

I would love it if they updated some textures, not the models, to give a more congruent look to the game.

Wow, that looks amazing!

Interesting but RT is still a novelty even with the 3xxx cards.

Probably take another gen or 2 to get it in a state that's more refined with performance.

That was Mario 64 and there was slowdown. Just think about that.

Im sorry but no. Still i can see how others would love this. It's just not for me

Super MaRTXio

I have a lot of respect for the programmers that pour so much passion into good fangames, or modifications of games. While the legality is disputable, the effort they choose to put in their craft anyways is commendable.

As others have pointed out above, the blend of low-poly models and JPEG backgrounds and extremely simple geometry, all put right next to very fancy and elaborate visual effects and shadowing, makes the game look... strange in a way? It felt like an eerie dream watching this, and admittedly this is what Wet-Dry World felt like to most players so that could be taken as a merit... But I do not think this would translate well into other courses without remaking a lot of graphics, and even small tweaks to the courses themselves. The original N64 version has charm in its simplicity which I think I'd prefer to the current state of this, but it's all subjective admittedly.

@RickD
Well. Those CD-ROM stock textures were state of the art back in 1996, and not really available to everyone.

I get what you mean, because these CD-ROM stock textures also seem very generic to me, but they became so in the early 2000.

SM64 was the first real success of a 3D platformer, and Nintendo was making the blueprint for all 3D platformers to come afterwards.

It's like the guy I talked with some years ago, who thought Lord of the Rings was just to generic classic high fantasy. And I was like. Yeah.... that's exactly what Lord of the Rings is. It is the beginning and blueprint for all high fantasy to come later. So of course it feels generic today.

SM64 is the Lord of the Rings of 3D platformers. It's the granddaddy.

I mean its cool but it looks too weird for me

Aint hard to make a ugly game look better but hey this is pretty impressive stuff, I like it. Wonder what it would look like on the other ugly looking game, OoT.

Reflections look cool, but the lighting feels unnecessarily dark and grimey. I kinda wish they’d gone into the “hidden city” part of the level to see the lighting down there, if there is any...

@RickD

It doesn't resemble a puzzle game, it's exactly that. And nightmare world is also an apt description, though I wouldn't say that negatively.

The level design, outside of a few levels, is great in Mario 64. But you can't understand how good it is unless you interact with it. A lot of the moves the modder is pulling off in the video aren't the moves you'd normally make and they're not how you'd typically traverse the level. There's a degree of creativity allowed to the player that even Odyssey fell short of. And part of that has to do with the often abstract layouts and art style, and the puzzle-ly nature of the objectives.

All of that said, Wet/Dry is admittedly the most divisive level in the game, and one of the most decidedly abstract and uncanny. This is practically the canonical view of it.

As for this ray-tracing exercise, it's cool, though it's nothing we haven't seen already with ray-traced Minecraft and Quake. The mix of low-poly architecture and sophisticated lighting and reflections is an interesting look, definitely, but also somewhat repetitive by now. I don't know.

so many of these comments are so negative ;-;
i think it looks amazing! especially for a simple mod : )

I just like the ultra-wide resolution. Idk it's nice to see everything around you

I don't totally love this, but if nintendo had put at least this much effort into mario 64 for the 3d collection, i doubt people would have made such a stink about it.

@Noid I agree, it's just distracting. Plus the game looks too dark and less colorful, I prefer the original look so much more.

That said, it is an interesting experiment to look at just for amusement, probably one of the better "fixes" people keep adding. I'd like to see how the other levels look.

Do "Pong" next. Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

I'm not sure I get all the hype around raytracing. Sure, reflections and lighting looks good, but I seriosuly doubt I could tell it apart from modern non-raytracing methods.

The excitement here if for when they put it together with the render 96 mod that makes the game loook like the promotional art

@Ganner there is a ps2 port https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDnw-Uexldc&t=0s

I love SM64, and visually I love the mod that makes the pc port look like the game artwork.

If Nintendo ever has hardware that could do ray tracing, I’d love to see what they could do with remaking 64 like this. Would really love to see 64’s physics with some higher res textures, and graphics like this.

@Slowdive mod your switch and download the port of the mario 64 to switch with wide-screen and full hd (and hd textures if you want xd)

Meanwhile, I'm just being the clown who bought the nearly untouched original for $60.

Looks nice but remaking the game to look too realistic will make Mario feel out of place with the game. You're basically taking away the cartoony environment from cartoony characters at this point.

"What features would you like to see added to Super Mario 64?"
Playable Peach, Yoshi, and Luigi. Peach has been a rescued enough times. It wouldn't hurt to have her own game mode where she does the rescuing for a change... Again. I know about her DS game.

Technically, all 3D games are ray-tracers

@T0biasCZe you don't need to mod your switch to get Super Mario 3D All Stars