"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" is no stranger to the modding community, with Zelda as a playable character and equipment from the classic game being added. But even though the official hardware has yet to catch up, mods can still offer a glimpse of what Nintendo can accomplish in the future. One ambitious YouTube channel modded "Breath of the Wild" to run at 8K resolution with ray tracing enabled, taking the game from "gorgeous" to "shocking." [This video is available on Digital Dreams' YouTube channel. For those unfamiliar, Digital Dreams promises viewers "the best next-generation graphics and photorealistic gameplay" by running upscale mods of popular games. Typically, Digital Dreams runs mods on PC games such as Grand Theft Auto V and The Witcher 3, which are relatively easy to install mods and change graphics settings. Occasionally, however, the channel turns to console games, including Breath of the Wild.

Once you get past the novelty of a Switch game running at eight times the resolution it used to, the video almost speaks for itself.

Digital Dreams guides Link through a variety of environments, including forests, swamps, mountains, beaches, and villages. Each new area displays a sharpness, color, and fluidity not found in the default game. Lighting effects, in particular, appear subtle and realistic thanks to ray tracing.

Another advantage of the Digital Dreams setup is that the game runs at 60 fps instead of the Switch's 30 fps. Anyone who has used a powerful gaming PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X is well aware that a higher frame rate makes a huge difference in both graphics and gameplay. However, running the Switch's graphically demanding games at 60 fps is difficult due to the machine's relatively modest specs.

The bad news, of course, is that the average player will not have the chance to experience Breath of the Wild in 8K anytime soon. In order to upscale the graphics, "Breath of the Wild" must be run on a PC, which requires Switch emulation. This process, which may or may not be legal, demands a lot of processing power on its own. Bringing the game up to 8K resolution and adding ray tracing would require even more processing power. Also, an 8K monitor is needed to enjoy the game to its fullest, but 8K monitors are quite scarce at this time.

In fact, this is not the first time Digital Dreams has attempted to run "Breath of the Wild" in 8K. In January, the channel also released an 8K/raytraced Zelda video, but that time the delicate "watercolor" effects that made the original game so captivating were considerably compromised. The new video appears to be more faithful to the switch version.

If you have a very powerful PC (and you need one that rivals the best gaming PCs on the market), a little modding know-how, and a willingness to navigate the complex legalities of emulation, you could try this yourself. As it stands, however, playing Breath of the Wild this way is out of reach for most people. Perhaps in the distant future, when Nintendo begins re-releasing old games directly into the brain via Switch Pro Max Ultra Neural, others will be able to try something similar.