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With the advent of ray tracing allowed by Nvidia's RTX graphics cards earlier this year, Minecraft's blocky aesthetic was massively spruced up. And now the feature is coming out of beta, and all Windows 10 Minecraft players with the GPUs that support it have path-traced ray tracing available, Nvidia announced Tuesday in a blog post.
Ray tracing allows for accurate, physics-based lighting in games if you have skipped the beta or other examples in 2020. In favour of a pixel art, sandbox fantasy aesthetic, Minecraft typically shirks realism, but the pairing fits here well. The lighting changes are most immediately apparent in water reflections, shadows that adapt dynamically to light sources and different light intensities.
RTX ray tracing, along with illumination, also facilitates more accurate 'physically dependent rendering' (PBR) in texture packs, including the ability to set each object's relative reflectivity. On Windows 10, Minecraft players will have access to a special PBR version of the default texture pack for use while playing, or before their favourite developer launches a modified pack of their own.
It seems like it might be a major performance hit to run the game with ray tracing, but Nvidia claims support for DLSS 2.0 on RTX cards, which stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, could keep the game running at a fast frame rate.
In Nvidia's Quality Mode, RTX 2060 owners can get about 60 frames per second playing at 1920 x 1080 resolution using artificial intelligence to save time rendering high-resolution images. Players with GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 cards should be able to play in 4K with well over" 60fps, Nvidia says. Under the particular testing conditions of Nvidia, which can be seen on their blog, all these benchmarks were set.
