Breath of the Wild looks dead without cel-shading

Zelda Breath of the Wild's cel-shading is responsible for much of the bright and vibrant visuals the game is known for...but what if these effects were turned off?

Using the Wii U Cemu emulator, intrepid PC gamer Arkh Longstride exposes the gritty underbelly of Breath of the Wild by turning off cel-shading. The result is a rather drab, depressing, and lifeless sandbox that's a far cry from the vivacious sunlit world we're used to.

A laundry list of mods and settings tweaks were also used to augment the core experience into a very high FPS, very grey Hyrule, but it also helps if you have NVIDIA's top-of-the-line RTX 2080Ti. Besides the rather minimal art design, the game looks and plays great on PC, but you'll need to of course hack, pirate, and fiddle to replicate this kind of performance.

Here's a list of all the settings Longstride used to capture this footage:

CEMU General SETTINGS:

Use separate shaders on

diable precompiled shaders On

Vsync off

Full sync at GX2DrawDone Off (stable for me without and i gain 10 max fps, you could need it)

Upscaler/Downscaler: Nearest Neighbor

XAudio 2 24ms

NVIDIA CP SETTINGS:

Anisotropic: 16x

Gamma correction On

AA mode: enhance the appl

AA setting: 8x

Max prerendered frame: 1

G-SYNC

Power management: Max performance

Refresh rate: highest available

Texture filtering: anisotropic sample optim. : off

Negative LOD bias: clamp

Threaded optimization: on

Triple buffering: (off whit gsync, on without)

Vertical Sync: on (same, i cap fps whit rvt)

GRAPHIC PACK SETTINGS:

Cel Shading DISABLED

Shadow Brightness fix by SkalFate

Clarity Jamie Preset

LOD BIAS Extreme

NVIDIA Defog v2 0.23 set

Char defogger 0.23 set

Volumetric dust and rays 1.2 set

Enhanced reflections

DS4UI

Dynamic FPS++ 120hz

PRO HUD+ (for video purpose, i dont use it in game)

Kakariko torch shadow

LWZX Crash fix

NVIDIA Explosion smoke

AA NVIDIA fxaa set

Resolution 4300x1800 (21:9)

Shadow Resolution High 2x

FoV mod: set far