SuperRT: An External Ray Tracing Co-Processor for the 30-Year-Old Gaming Console

In 3D computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique used to bring an extra level of realism to games by rendering realistic reflections or shadows. Today, this can be commonly found in PC games, but now we can see it getting into gaming consoles as well. It looks nearly impossible to bring advanced graphics onto the 30-year-old gaming console. But game developer Ben Carter has managed to develop an SNES to do ray tracing.

The Super FX chip is a 16-bit RISC coprocessor on the graphics support unit (GSU) for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which includes games like Star Fox and Dirt Racer. It was designed to boost rendering capabilities but wasn't able to provide realistic features with advanced effects like ray tracing.

Carter's project is similar to the Super FX but with the addition of ray tracing and worked as an external graphics co-processing to the Super Nintendo gaming console. The demo shows the screen resolution to be 200x160, which obviously cannot be compared to the high-resolution PC games. But in terms of visual effects, it is surely an upgrade to the existing 3D animations on the console.

The chip is based on the DE10-Nano FPGA development board paired with Cyclone V FPGA. So, the ROM is removed and replaced with a cable joined to the FPGA board. "The full image can only be refreshed once every two frames, effectively limiting the maximum framerate to 30FPS — although the test scene runs at closer to 20FPS".

More details on the project are available on the shironekolabs website, along with photos of the process and the results.