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.
Super Mario 64 RTX Mod Adds Ray-Traced Lighting And Reflections
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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 every stage, with dynamic sphere lights for objects and particles. Normal maps and a real-time denoiser are supported as well.
The project also supports NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR 2, and Intel XeSS. These upscaling technologies can help improve performance, which matters because path tracing can be demanding even on modern graphics cards. All that said, players should not expect a completely polished experience. DaríoSamo describes sm64rt as an alpha project and warns about potential visual glitches and performance issues. The developer also notes that performance depends heavily on the resolution and settings the player chooses to use.
Interestingly, this project isn’t entirely new: DaríoSamo first attracted attention for bringing ray tracing to Super Mario 64 in 2020. By May 2021, the developer had released a public technical version, giving PC players an opportunity to try the technology themselves.
Super Mario 64 RTX Project Draws Comparisons With Ocarina Of Time Remake
The Super Mario 64 RTX build also brings to mind the fan-made The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake by CryZENx, which reimagined Nintendo’s other iconic N64 adventure in Unreal Engine. That project attracted considerable attention for its updated environments and lighting before the developer announced an end to its development following Nintendo’s official remake announcement.
There’s an important difference between the two projects, though. CryZENx’s work focused on rebuilding Ocarina of Time in Unreal Engine, while sm64rt retains the foundation of the original Super Mario 64 PC port and adds a path-traced renderer. Nintendo hasn’t announced an official Super Mario 64 remaster.
For now, sm64rt remains a fan-made project, and its continued development shows how much room there is to revisit older games without completely rebuilding them. Players interested in this project can find its source code on GitHub and follow the instructions to install it, although they will need their own legally obtained Nintendo 64 game copy to build and play it.
Super Mario 64
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