Random: Watch out, next-generation real-time ray tracing is now available on the SNES

Ray tracing is more than a buzzword, it’s actually a big deal for next-generation gaming. While we probably won’t see it on a Nintendo platform anytime soon, at least game developer and software engineer Ben Carter has a unofficially way to make this rendering technique work on Super Nintendo hardware.

In a video on his YouTube channel Shironeko Labs, he explains how he was inspired by the legendary Super FX chip that makes games like Star Fox, to create a modified cartridge called “SuperRT” – allowing the Super Nintendo to handle real-time ray tracing, and well … the results are pretty impressive. Watch the videos below.

“What I wanted to try and do was something similar to the Super FX chip used in titles like Star Fox, where the SNES runs the game logic and hands a scene description to a chip in the cartridge to generate the footage. I have deliberately tried to limit myself to using a single custom chip for the design, without using the ARM core available on the DE10 board or other external processing resources. “