'Minecraft' Looks Like A Completely New Game Using NVIDIA's RTX Ray Tracing

When you think of Minecraft you may think of blocksy graphics and simple textures. But the recent launch of ray tracing capabilities for NVIDIA's RTX graphics cards turns it into a completely new game. Simply put, ray tracing enables more realistic lighting, reflections and shadows. It's like jumping from grainy VHS tapes into HD.

Although I'm forced to admit that I haven't had the time to spend much time with Minecraft, I do respect it as a fun tool for younger gamers. It was partly because I didn't have the patience to play an enormous, unstructured game. And partly because I didn't like the appearance of the game. If you plan on spending hours in a virtual world, aesthetics are very important. This is why I didn't get into World of Warcraft. Ray tracing makes Minecraft more immersive.

The difference is evident the first time you load up one of the six environments that comprise NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Worlds pack, each of which was created by master Minecraft builders. Aquatic Adventure's water reflections and transparency impressed me when I first picked the game. Similar graphical flourishes are seen in high budget games like Assassin's Creed, but they always feel like an accurate representation of real life. Although Minecraft's mirrored water blocks were flat and in motion, it felt like you were in an actual lake.

Then there are the rays of light which shower the game in the warm glow. You can almost feel the sunlight on your face. These are "god Rays,"" large-scale light scattering effects that are designed to mimic the way sunlight shines through clouds. While they can sometimes seem excessive, as in the way J.J. Abrams is notorious for throwing lens flares at everything the chance to see god rays reflected in a realistic manner using ray tracing was simply stunning. It didn't matter whether I was underwater or just looking at trees from above, the diffuse light looked so good I was almost astonished that it was being rendered in real time.

Although it might seem like I'm just giddy about the beautiful graphics, after spending hours in this Minecraft beta I am more enthusiastic than ever about the potential impact of ray-tracing on the way we play games. Remedy's Control, for example, used ray tracing in different ways, and worked alongside traditional rendering techniques. Minecraft Going full tilt in Ray Tracing is something we've only seen demonstrated so far in this Minecraft beta and NVIDIA's RTX enabled Quake 2 demo.

Ray tracing is similar to HDR in that it's a fresh method to add depth and texture, regardless whether it's rendered in 1080p or 4K. I find the rush to 4K a bit naive. It's a lot of processing power to crunch more pixels. It's not always apparent from your couch, but it can be a significant boost in performance over 1,440p and 1080p. As TVs and monitors move towards higher refresh rates, I'd expect that many gamers will put more emphasis on frame rates and noticeable visual enhancements like HDR and ray tracing over 4K rendering. (But of course, the dream is to meet all those benchmarks in the near future.)

My biggest takeaway from the Minecraft RTX beta is: Realistic lighting goes a long way. It makes everything seem more real and immersive when the lighting is from where it needs to go, and when shadows react realistically, reflections appear like you'd expect. It's the difference between feeling as if you're playing games, and feeling like you're entering an actual virtual world.

Unfortunately Ray tracing is extremely power-hungry, and not accessible to all gamers. On my test rig, which is powered by a Core i7 8700K CPU and an RTX 2080 Ti, Minecraft slows down to around 53FPS in 1080p when the ray tracing feature is enabled. And the impact is greater on the more affordable RTX 2060, which falls to around 30 FPS, according to NVIDIA's benchmarks. This is where the company's DLSS tech is in. It makes use of AI-powered rendering to produce better quality results from images with lower resolution. When I switched it on, Minecraft jumped to around 93FPS on my 1080p system. And NVIDIA says it'll give that struggling RTX 2060 GPU a bump to around 53FPS.

Performance is worse on RTX laptops, which aren't as powerful as desktop counterparts. NVIDIA claims that its RTX 2080 Max-Q machine like Acer's Triton 500, will hit 57 FPS in Minecraft with ray tracing and DLSS enabled. You can expect things to be slower with RTX 2060 or 2070 models, as this is the top-of-the-line mobile GPU.

These limitations are the reason why I don't believe most games will fully embrace Ray Tracing anytime in the near future. But not in the same way as we've seen with Minecraft. I'd also bet that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X both of which will run AMD's forthcoming Radeon hardware, will have similar difficulties managing ray tracing performance. It's enjoyable to see developers experiment with this new technology. Don't get caught up in the rush to 4K. We'll be judging games in the future based on how they incorporate Ray Tracing and other graphical upgrades that you'll actually notice.