Ray-tracing technology, which has been available on PC for a few years now, has finally come to consoles: the PS5 has it, the Xbox Series S and X have it, and 30 years after its release, the SNES is getting it. No kidding – ray tracing was performed on the 1990 Nintendo console, thanks to an incredible mod from programmer Ben Carter (via Gizmodo). And it is done by a chip he calls SuperRT.
Ray tracing is typically used to make games look more realistic by simulating the way light bounces off surfaces, resulting in gradation of color from bright objects and reflection from shiny surfaces. As you can see in the video demo above, the technology on the SNES doesn’t push graphics boundaries, but come on – it’s an SNES.
Well, technically it’s a Famicom, which is the same hardware in a different package for Japan. The real magic, though, is that it’s a completely standard console (except for the fact that the top has been removed to make room for a bunch of wires): all processing is done by a chip that Carter programmed and added to a game cartridge.
Adding processing power to the SNES by adding another processor to the game cartridge is nothing new: Nintendo did it with both Star Fox and Yoshi’s Island. (It added 3D functionality and special effects, of course, not ray tracing.) To achieve real-time ray tracing, Carter couldn’t just use the old Super FX chips Nintendo did.
Instead, he had to use a modern field programmable gate array chip (FPGA), which allowed him to record information about the scene being displayed by the SNES and process the ray tracing for it. If you want to take an in-depth look at how it’s done, Carter has a blog post explaining how he did it. He also has a video explaining his methodology, embedded below.
This mod is super cool, not just from a tech and hacking perspective, but because it offers a look at an alternate reality – not the one in which ray tracing was magically created in the 1990s, but one in which low-poly 3D games from the 90’s have been remastered but keep the art style. As someone who grew up around that time, I love to see 2D and 3D games get modern looking remakes, but I would also like to see the art style come back with modern tricks like ray tracing and anti-aliasing. And if I had to imagine what it would look like, it would be a lot like Carter’s demo.