'Minecraft' Looks like an Entirely new Game With NVIDIA's RTX Ray Tracing

When you think of Minecraft you may think of blocksy graphics and simple textures. The beta launch of ray tracing capabilities on NVIDIA's RTX graphics cards has made it a completely new game. Ray tracing lets you create more realistic lighting, reflections and shadows. It's like jumping from VHS tapes that are grainy to HD.

While I must admit that I've not spent a lot of time playing Minecraft however, I am a fan of it as a tool for creativity for kids. Partially I just did not have the time to play a massive unstructured game. Also frankly I've never liked the look of it. If you're planning on spending hours in a virtual world aesthetics are vital. This is the reason I didn't play World of Warcraft. Ray tracing can make Minecraft more immersive.

The difference is obvious the first time you load one of the six environments in NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Worlds Pack. Each of the six environments was designed by master Minecraft builders. Worstlies When I started up Aquatic Adventure, I was gobsmacked by the water reflections and the clarity of crystal blocks. We've seen similar graphical flourishes from big budget titles such as the Assassin's Creed series, but they've always felt as an approximate representation of reality. Although Minecraft's water blocks that were mirrored were immobile and flat it felt as if you were standing in front of a real lake.

Then there are the rays of light that throw the game in an enthralling glow. You can almost feel the sun on your face. These are "god rays,"" large-scale light scattering effects that are designed to evoke the way light peaks through clouds. While they can be used in a way that is overused in the same way as when J.J. Abrams flings lens flares at everything, it was amazing to see god rays using Ray Tracing. It didn't matter if I was underwater or simply looking up at trees, the diffuse light looked so good I almost believed it was being rendered in real time.

Although it could sound like I am just giddy about the beautiful graphics, after having spent hours in the Minecraft beta I am more enthusiastic than ever before about how Ray Tracing will alter the way we experience games. Remedy's Control, for example, used ray tracing in a mixed fashion where it was used in conjunction with traditional rendering techniques. We've seen ray-tracing in full force with the Minecraft beta and NVIDIA’s Quake 2 demo.

Ray tracing has a similar feel to HDR in that it's a novel method to add depth and texture, no matter whether it's rendered in 1080p or 4K. I find the rush to 4K a little foolish. That's lots of processing power that is being utilized to process more pixels, and you may not notice a significant difference when in contrast to 1,440p or 1080p -- especially from your couch. As monitors and TVs move towards higher refresh rates, I'd imagine that many gamers will be focusing on frame rates and noticeable visual enhancements such as HDR and ray tracing above 4K rendering. (But of course, the dream is to hit all of these benchmarks eventually.)

My big takeaway from the Minecraft RTX beta? Realistic lighting goes a long way. Everything feels more immersive when light comes from where it should, when shadows respond realistically, and reflections appear as you expect. It's the difference between feeling as though you're playing a video game, and feeling like you're in a virtual world.

Ray tracing is still very energy-intensive and is not accessible to the majority of gamers. On my test rig, which is powered by a Core i7 8700K CPU and an RTX 2080 Ti, Minecraft slows down to 53 FPS in 1080p when ray tracing is turned on. And the impact is greater on the less expensive RTX 2060 which slows down to around 30 FPS , according to NVIDIA's benchmarks. That's where the company's DLSS technology comes into play. It uses AI-powered rendering to produce higher quality results from images with lower resolution. When I switched it on, Minecraft jumped to around 93FPS on my 1080p system. NVIDIA promises to give the struggling RTX 2060 GPU an extra 53FPS.

Performance is worse on RTX laptops that aren't as powerful as desktop counterparts. NVIDIA claims that an RTX 2080 Max-Q laptop, 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 and 2070 machines, as this is the company's top-of-the-line mobile GPU.

With these limitations, I don't expect any games to fully embrace Ray Tracing anytime soon- certainly not in the way we've seen in Minecraft. I'd also bet that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X both of which run AMD's upcoming Radeon hardware, will experience similar problems coping with the performance of ray-tracing. But it's still pleasing to see developers playing with this new technology. Forget the rush to 4K -- we'll evaluate future games based on how well they implement graphics and ray tracing you'll notice.