MaxLastBreath

NX Optimizer / UltraCam Beta 19 Tears Of The Kingdom: The Graphics Update (Patreon)

Published:

2026-07-19 17:48:37

Edited:

2026-07-19 18:19:40

Imported:

2026-07

Content

Hey everyone, please check the latest blog for info on the current situation and development update :), you can also find the beta 19 patch notes below here!

How to Get/Install the beta Guide

These Patch notes are for Beta 19 2026 released on July 19th

TLDR:

Beta 19 is the biggest update in the history of this project and it isn't even close, more went into this one than the last 3 betas put together, over 12 months of work went into this. Beta 19 is the Graphics Update, UltraCam now has its own custom shader system and an entire custom shader pipeline that runs inside the game itself: HDR, XeGTAO Ambient Occlusion, Volumetric Fog, God Rays, custom Point Lights, Depth of Field, TAA, SMAA and A LOT more. None of this was possible before beta 19, the shader injector simply did not exist.

The main topic is HDR, UltraCam now renders the game in real high dynamic range, by injecting a custom tonemapper called Psycho17 made by shortfuse (the creator of RenoDX), the tonemapper itself is the work of shortfuse, souperman9, Ritsu, Musa and the RenoDX team, I integrated it and built everything needed to actually run it inside the game. To be clear since this WILL get confused, this is not the RenoDX mod you install separately, this is a completely new thing that runs inside of UltraCam, and it should rival and honestly surpass the Switch 2's own HDR. To get HDR working on emulators I also had to write a whole separate Vulkan layer called UltraCamVk, it's drop-in, multiple files next to the emulator exe and it works on all emulators equally, Windows only for now.

If you've been following the betas you've seen me suffer with the shader manager for over a year now, disabled in 15, ripped out completely in 16 and 17 because it kept crashing the game 40 minutes into a session. Beta 19 is where all of that finally pays off, the crashes are gone because UltraCam itself was rebuilt around it, the C++'s STD library is gone, the memory system is completely new, UltraCam is not the same mod it was a year ago, it's a completely different beast now. Shader replacement finally works.

The entire codebase has also been split into a shared engine and per-game layers, this is what makes a second game possible at all, which means BOTW is NOT in this release, it's coming in beta 20, I'd rather delay BOTW than delay this entire update even further.

The Color Grading and Post Processing shaders are Patreon/Kofi exclusive, with that said, our first public TOTK build in 6 months is releasing very very soon, there will be a public RC test and I've prepared some surprises with it over the next few months :)!!!

PLEASE keep in mind this is an entirely new rendering system, it touches every single frame the game draws, expect bugs, especially differences between hardware and emulators, please report them in our server!

Also announcing beta updates coming for Breath of the Wild / Echoes of Wisdom / Link's Awakening and Xenoblade, those are smaller in scope, mostly bringing the shader features and the new menu over, BOTW is definitely the biggest one out of those.