Super Mario 64 has received plenty of fan-made upgrades over the years, but few change the way the original game handles lighting as dramatically as this one. A ray-tracing project for the classic Nintendo 64 platformer has surfaced on social media, giving players an exciting look at what the 1996 release can look like with modern rendering technology.
A clip of Super Mario 64’s RTX build was shared by X user TirednONFIRE, who claimed that the project had wrongly received a DMCA notice. Thankfully, it’s now available to set up on your PC, but before you hit the “Download ZIP” button on this one, it’s worth noting that this build doesn’t include the original game files and requires you to own a legal copy of Super Mario 64.
The project in question is sm64rt, developed by DaríoSamo. Available on GitHub, it’s a fork of the Super Mario 64 PC port that adds support for RT64, a hardware-accelerated real-time path tracer. Unlike a conventional texture pack, the project changes how light interacts with the game’s environments, objects, and surfaces. Its feature list includes real-time ray-traced shadows, reflections, and refractions, alongside global illumination. It also uses custom lighting for...
