This is a fun one. A newly published Mario Kart World patent reveals that the game enlarges distant opponents, characters, and items to enhance their visibility to the player. I think that it’s particularly helpful when playing handheld.
To prevent negatively affect any game logics such as collision detection, these objects are not physically resized. The enlargement is performed only in the rendering pipeline, through a vertex shader. So they aren’t actually bigger, only visually so.
For this to look natural (image 1 below), the ratio of magnification is determined by object distance and linear interpolation (image 2). Moreover, a moving object is magnified more aggressively than a stationary object (image 2 vs image 3), to amplify visibility of the former.
The reference point of a character or vehicle may need to be repositioned (images below), so that it doesn’t appear to be floating or sinking after magnification. The coordinate conversion is also performed by the vertex shader.
[Originally posted on 2026-02-12 Pacific Time]
