Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Has Two Native PC Recompilations with Frame Generation and DLSS, While a Switch 2 Emulator Fork Runs It on Jailbroken PS5s

We've reported that the newly released Nintendo Switch 2 game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has run on PC emulators since day one, but modder NotRexed (the same one who ported Tears of the Kingdom last month) has successfully recompiled a native PC version titled Hookshot with built-in custom frame generation up to 8x. NotRexed is not the only one, either: fellow modder tangerineturtle1 has released another native PC recompilation titled NX2navi, which supports AMD FSR 3.1 and NVIDIA DLSS upscaling, as well as FSR 3.1 Frame Generation and even HDR displays.

Hookshot Builder compiles the game on your own machine from your own copy, which takes 10 to 45 minutes and requires roughly 60 GB of free space while it runs. According to NotRexed, players need an RTX 20-series card or newer, an RX 6000 or newer, or an Intel Arc card, because the game relies on mesh shaders. Anything older, like AMD's RX 5000 series, renders with missing pieces and is unsupported. NVIDIA is by far the best tested; Intel reports are mostly black screens. Hookshot comes with a proper PC options menu, opened with Insert: quality presets scaled to your VRAM, frame generation from 2x to 8x, frame pacing, output resolution up to 4K, upscaling and sharpening, an ultrawide toggle, and full control remapping with native mouse-look. Mods work too, in the same folder layout emulators use.

YouTuber RJTHEGAME laid out why people interested in playing Ocarina of Time on PC are looking at these native PC ports rather than emulators. On the Lichii emulator, AMD cards hit a black screen before the intro, while NVIDIA cards worked fine. Even after that, stutter was relentless. On a 5090, he describes spending over an hour pacing the same area before shaders finally settled, only for the next area to stutter all over again. His 7900 XTX wasn’t even maxing out the GPU and still never smoothed out. On Hookshot, he reports the ultra preset holding a solid 60 FPS with better image quality than Lichii, and frame generation pushing the counter to 180 FPS.

NX2navi takes the same approach but a different route on image quality, and on paper, it is the more feature-complete of the two. It's Windows-only and describes itself as early but playable, with Kokiri Forest, Kakariko Village, Death Mountain Trail and its crater, the Temple of Time and the Great Fairy fountains all running at 60 fps or better on current hardware.

Where Hookshot offers basic scaling filters, NX2navi ships DLSS with DLAA and the full quality ladder on RTX cards, or FSR 3.1 with Native AA on anything else, rendering the 3D at a lower internal resolution while keeping the HUD sharp. FSR 3.1 frame generation roughly doubles framerate on any GPU. There is even native ultrawide support at 21:9 and 32:9 (with menus and cutscenes held at 16:9), resolutions up to 5K, framerate options from 30 to 240 or unlimited, HDR on compatible displays (both the native one from the Switch 2 game and an enhanced version derived from SDR), and 5.1 surround. It also precompiles every shader at build time and rebuilds pipelines in the background at each launch, which should theoretically sidestep the compilation stutter that plagues both Lichii and Hookshot at the moment.

Needless to say, there are plenty of options to play the remade masterpiece on PC, and they are bound to improve over time, unless Nintendo drops the hammer on them all. But perhaps the wildest thing is that the emulator Eglantine has a PS5 fork that plays The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (as well as other Switch 2 games) on jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles. Granted, the frame rate is abysmal and crashes are frequent, but that it even happens is mind-boggling.

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