What's new
Reactive fog in Cap Kingdom
The fog sea in Cap Kingdom now reacts to Mario, Cappy and the camera with ripples and waves, as on the Switch. The game measures the fog's surface by reading a texture on the CPU that the graphics card draws. That value now comes back from the GPU, so ripples are no longer rejected as "too far from the surface".
Lower memory use
- Shaders are now prepared when they're first needed, not for everything an area loads. In Cascade Kingdom on Windows, memory use drops from 11.2 GB to 9.4 GB.
- New Menu > Performance > Shaders > Memory use: Auto (default), Normal or Low.
- Low prepares each shader the first time it's drawn: about 5 GB, with a short stutter the first time an effect appears.
- Auto picks Low on PCs with less than 12 GB of RAM.
- The game itself still needs about 3 GB plus what's on screen, so 4 GB of RAM isn't enough. The menu tells you so.
Choose your monitor (#8)
Menu > Display > Monitor lists every connected display by name and resolution, plus Current display. The game moves to the one you pick, and your choice is saved. It also notices when a display is plugged in or removed.
Better DLSS
- DLSS now actually runs on normal installs. It needs the game's camera every frame, and before this only debug builds supplied it, so DLSS was quietly skipped.
- Proper temporal sampling. Each frame is shifted by a tiny offset that DLSS uses to rebuild detail. Only the 3D scene is shifted, not shadows or the HUD.
- Sharper textures. Texture detail is chosen for your output resolution, not the lower internal one.
- Two sharpening controls: DLSS's own sharpening (RCAS), and the optional CAS on top. FSR 1 keeps its own slider.
- Switch DLSS modes during play, without restarting.
Smoother motion controls
- Opening or closing the menu no longer feeds the game a sudden jump in controller tilt, which could count as a shake and throw Cappy.
- After a menu, a save load or a kingdom change, the gyro settles for a moment first.
- The gyro also learns its own small drift while the controller rests, but never during real turns or shakes.
Fixes
- Opening cutscene crash at 120 FPS (#18): the new-game opening now gets the same setup for extra frames as stages and kingdom flights.
- Point sprites: effects drawn as points get the right maximum size.
- Linear textures: textures the game reads row by row now use the Switch's row alignment.
Being worked on
We're testing these locally before the next update:
- FSR 3.1 / FSR 4 and XeSS upscaling. FSR 3 is in progress now.
- Frame generation for NVIDIA, AMD and Intel cards.
- More DLSS quality work.
- Sharper HUD and menu text.
- A graphics sweep through every kingdom with a 100% save, looking for other effects broken the way the fog was. This includes the invisible poison in the Spewart fight (#3), which is probably the same kind of problem.
- Even lower memory use for 8 GB PCs.
- Open issues:
Updating
Windows: open the menu (F1) > Updates > Download and install, or extract the zip below over your current folder. Your game files, saves, settings and mods stay.
Linux / Steam Deck (experimental): download the AppImage below, make it executable and start it. Setup: docs/linux.md.
Notes
- You need the extracted
exefsandromfsfolders of your own copy of Super Mario Odyssey (1.0.0, or 1.4.1 with the update applied). Nothing of the game is included. - The reactive fog needs game version 1.4.1. If it causes trouble, start the game with the environment variable
ODYSSEY_FOG_CPU_READBACK=0to switch it off.