Mario Kart World Runs on an 8GB PC, but There’s a Catch

A PC player says they’ve managed to get Mario Kart World running on a machine with just 8GB of RAM. There’s one fairly substantial catch: it’s slow, glitchy, and eventually crashed their entire PC.

Reddit user D_O_P_C_ shared the experiment on r/pcmasterrace, listing an Intel Core i5-9400F processor, 8GB of DDR4 memory, and a Radeon RX 580 2048SP graphics card. They say they used a Linux version of the PokeDinner emulator fork.

That makes this an experiment on older hardware, rather than another demonstration powered by a top-end graphics card. However, the uploader’s description makes clear that getting the game to run and getting it to run well are still very different things.

“It took a loooong time to boot and it’s glitchy, laggy, low res and it crashed after some minutes of playing,” they wrote.

The uploader also said they had configured the emulator to provide 12GB of simulated console memory, despite their PC having only 8GB of physical system RAM. Those settings describe how much memory the emulated console is presented with; they don’t add more RAM to the computer.

They suspected that mismatch contributed to the crash and planned to try an 8GB setting instead. That explanation hasn’t been established, and the post doesn’t provide a confirmed fix or a measured average frame rate.

The experiment comes amid wider progress in Switch 2 emulation. The developers of Eglantine, a separate experimental emulator derived from Eden, Yuzu and Sudachi, say Mario Kart World can run at full speed depending on the hardware and settings.

Stability remains a problem, though. Reports on the project’s issue tracker describe stuttering, freezes and crashes across different configurations, including systems with considerably more memory.

For this particular player, the appeal was seeing whether their machine could manage it at all.

“I’m just experimenting and having fun, not writing a scientific paper,” they explained.

It’s an encouraging experiment for anyone following Switch 2 emulation on older PCs. A reliable way to play Mario Kart World on an 8GB machine, however, remains unproven.