Digital Foundry tests Super Mario Galaxy running on Nvidia Shield

Since March, Super Mario Galaxy, Punchout!!, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and New Super Mario Bros. Wii are available on the Nvidia Shield – however, only in China. This caused quite a bit of speculation since the Tegra chip used in the Nvidia Shield is similar to the one used by Nintendo Switch systems. Whether or not this means that HD re-releases of Wii games could be coming to the Switch at some point in the future is uncertain, but their performance on the Nvidia Shield does give a rough estimate on what they would look like on the Switch. In fact, this is exactly what the tech experts at Digital Foundry did – they looked at the Nvidia Shield version of Super Mario Galaxy and analyzed its technical performance.

You can watch the full analysis in the video below, but the gist of it is that the emulation technology used is quite impressive and that clearly a lot of work was put into this port, even if it can’t get around all the hurdles of it originally being a game on 12-year old hardware.