SuperRT - Realtime raytracing on the SNES (walkthrough and technical overview) 

Yeah, I agree on that.

Nostalgic feels

This is the kind of thing that we just wouldn't believe back then. If it was just a screenshot in a magazine or even a video, nah, no way. I'd need to have the controller in my hand and move it around to believe it. In fact, something like this happened with Doom 3 back in the day as well, with lots of people just saying it would be downgraded before release, that it was pre-rendered somehow.

Well it's using modern day technology

It isn't that out of reach for 90s. Would be out of price range for the cartridge, though

@@fhunter1test Not just out of price range. He'd need far more electrical power for the prohibitively expensive computer or cluster that would need to take its place. SGI Octane workstations might have enough performance but they use roughly 500 to 1000 watts.

@@IARRCSim Una pregunta, está usando el hardware de la Super Nintendo, o el CHIP SFX?

It looks so basic yet so good

what is this aesthetic called?

@@F4sy Render96

Its like the LSD World

Watch the music videos for Jan Hammer called "Beyond the mind's eye". It's more like a miniseries on the future of computer graphics back in 1992. It's very much like this scene.

Well only 25 likes got ray traced

@@bolby2232 low specularity, so it doesn't looks like a mirror

@@diefessonsousasilva3244 hahah you're briliant...

makes sense

@@bolby2232 It's diffuse reflections instead of specular reflections. Of course the numbers aren't perfectly reflective! ;)

Taking the Thanos approach 😆

Shpegetlers

Are u a pastAfarian aswell

RTX cards suck compared to AMD (atleast for what I do) also I'm the 1000th like very pretty

With low-poly models, no textures, and running at 200x160, I think even the PS5 could manage to do this.

You can do real time ray tracing on the original Xbox... if your scene is 15 cubes and 20 spheres :D

@@maighstir3003 No shit Sherlock

People still waste money on consoles? Lol.

@@lordkrythic6246 Can't play Smash Bros on a PC! (tho you can play Rivals of Aether... but it's not quite the same)

Not really, the characters is flat

@Butt Cube Would work. Doom on SNES is built on a custom engine, which is genuinely 3D.

@@mcjodice No, it is not 3d it runs exactly like normal doom with more snes optimised code. The SuperFX chip is only used for sprite rotation and scaling.

Back then...

@@oliverjurd Randy Linden said 90% of the rendering was done by the SuperFX2

thepoorstudenthobbyist.com/2017/09/14/how-to-make-a-snes-reproduction-cartridge/

It’s not on the SNES though, the SNES is only handling graphics output, all of the processing is being done on three CPUs in this board that happen to be connected to the SNES.

SNES as the car, and the CPUs as the drivers. Neat.

@@yellowblanka6058 0:30 mentions "one of the most interesting things from that era of gaming was that many titles made use of expansion chips in the game cartridge that provided extra functionality..." Shironeko Labs made all this ray tracing functionality work like an expansion chip that was supported by original SNES consoles. It is augmenting the hardware of the SNES but in the same way a lot of SNES games did when the SNES console was new. The main difference is that he has some very impressive 2020's real time ray tracing technology in his expansion chip which completely blows away performance of expansion chips from the early 1990's. Another difference is that he didn't compress his prototype to fit in a cartridge.

@@IARRCSim To be fair, I don't consider games making heavy use of expansion chips an indictment of the power of the host system in general, though at least in the case of games like Star Fox it was using the SNES for things like scaling the sprites for the shots etc. - if a piece of code would never work well without a co-processing chip far more power and/or specialized than the chips in the host console, it's not an indicator of the power of that console, or the game wouldn't NEED that chip.

cramming 3 50mhz cores in a cart with 90s technology calls for a cart of at least NeoGeo proportions, and a price of at least 2 full fledged computers, so feasible? yes. Practical, nope. Cool af? you bet!

Nintendo,HIRE THIS MAN!

@@ceciliatavarez5655 NINTENDO, SUE THIS MAN

@@molo-molo5103 Well, suing this man for his achievements using Nintendo hardware could actually end up with a settlement that involves hiring him for his ability instead of shutting it down, as it has happened in the video game industry before. But Nintendo being Nintendo, I guess they could also get irrational about it...

@@data676 nintendo is just like Disney

Ikr

I second that!

holy $&”@, I never thought there’d be a chance SNES would get ray traced Star Fox

@@protocetid ehh since star fox is fast paced, i'll probably struggle with RTX. a mod to improve framerate without speeding up the game might be possible though, remains to be seen.

@@lucaspec7284 Oof so a Super Mario 64 demake would be out of question? Paper Mario would be easier on the hardware with its many sprites, wouldn’t impress to the same degree as SM64.

silicone?

Well as he said, the cartridge only gives the instructions. Not the power

@@middleclassthrash i wonder if it is possible to increase the resolution amd framerate of it by adding extra ram, that would be great, for what i understand is that due the limited bandwide the snes can only stream video at 160x200 at 30fps in 8bpp, but maybe if we could increase the ram, we could increase the bandwide to allow streaming video at 256x240 at 60fps , I say this because it comes to mind that the sattelaview addon for the snes has 256KB of extra ram to increase the performance of the snes, but if that also means that you can stream video at a higher quality on snes??? I just don’t know but am curious about that!!!

This would be awesome with an editor, ala 3D construction kit to facilitate that... SNES Devs??

People ARE still releasing new games on cartridges for retro systems.

Yeah, even static images would give some dope ass vaporwave album covers.

I would love to be able to use this more music videos.

Raytracing in space could be a problem, cuz the only source of light is the near star.

@@metalslayer777 just have a light source at the camera and problem solved

I'd rather prefer star fox with textures instead imo

@@Sh-hg8kf Textures are overrated. Eventually, they'll be obsolete.

@@InfernosReaper bruh wat

yeah i was thinking about it. At the very least, he can take a look at that backup device

Yeah, I was also wondering about whether or not this could be realized with the SD2SNES Pro/FXPAK Pro. Fingers crossed it will happen; the firmware updates are live on Github, afterall. github.com/mrehkopf/sd2snes

It would have been awesome!! :o

Feasible but would've been too expensive

This is just like the special effects in the movies! Wait, why does the cart cost more than the snes?

Super Mario FX

The real ray tracing is performed on a modern FPGA. Using '90s hardware would require an expansion card 10 times the size of a SNES.

@Robert w It's an interesting story, can you elaborate further/refer articles? tnx

@@Rand0081 - If I remember correctly that was the company claiming they could do ray-tracing 10,000 times faster then the competition, dedicated hardware would help in that endeavor. Also I believe they had an add-on card that could do ray-tracing at 30 fps running on a something as low as a 5 watt add-on chip. I'm pulling this info from memory so it is possible I got some of the facts wrong and some of the info is more then 10 years old, but I do remember the articles were on tomshardware and they still should be searchable.

@@Rand0081 So, not impossibly large.

@@Rand0081 Perhaps, but imagine this sort of thing in an arcade cab back then

you trapped in gilr's body?

@BroadTeamFaba or just missclicked

@BroadTeamFaba For last gen. Not all gen.

It's "vote fudging" and literally every website does this in order to throw off spammers looking to game the system.

@@awsomeboy360 agreed, i played through the entire game on pc without experiencing a single glitch or bug miraculously

/watch?v=todarS6XTPc already a thing

not that hard at all, how much time do you have?

I did write simple raymarcher in TI-Basic (quite different from raytracing but similarly processor intensive) and it took 35 hours to render an image. But hey, you never specified it needs to be realtime!

already exists

Or just romhack the support in

How about go a bit backwards

What if they made super mario 64 on the snes?

@@seymourkrelborn4780 that makes absolutely no sense. You would have to remake Mario 64 from scratch to specifically run on a 16 bit cpu. Not to mention that the SNES has far less ram. The reverse engineered code for Mario64 would help a bit but most of the rendering would need to be completely rewritten. Absolutely nothing about this would be a "rom hack".

@@Cybertronic72388 I was refering to adding support for this chip to Star Fox. Did you mean to reply to @Mario Mario?

It's about 130 bucks for a DE10 nano with the Cyclone V. Honestly just build a MiSTer at that point instead.

Rtx is just the brand, and you gotta take into account that this is the lowest quality you can get away with and its not really a game he's showing it's just a collection of objects not doing much.

It always have been

Hell yeah

@Fat Chocobo only thing that is upgradable is It Ram

@Fat Chocobo I am well aware of that but because it was cartridge based super fx like acceleration would have been possible however impractical. To what extent it could be done is what i was wondering.