Minecraft's RTX beta is out now - and it's simply beautiful

Users of Nvidia's RTX graphics cards are in for a treat today: a beta version of the fully path-traced version of Minecraft is available, giving users unfettered access to a version of the game running under the DirectX ray tracing API. In combination with the launch, key Minecraft creators have teamed up with Nvidia to showcase path tracing to spectacular effect, with six bespoke maps available to download from the Minecraft marketplace. On top of that, this release also sees the debut of physically based materials. Downloading any one of the creator maps released today automatically adds these textures into the game, but users can also create their own materials and 'side-load' them into the game.

Let's not mince words here - path tracing in Minecraft is one of the most transformative uses of ray tracing we've seen. While the core visuals themselves are rather simplistic (it is Minecraft after all), this means that there's a surfeit of GPU power that can be reployed into pushing ray traced effects to extreme levels. Most RT-enabled games use a combination of standard rasterisation techniques with ray tracing features on top - hybrid rendering, if you like. In Minecraft RTX, everything is ray traced: every element is realistically, correctly lit - and as you'll see in the embedded video below, the extent of this implementation produces effects we've never seen in games before.

Of course we have seen different flavours of ray tracing in Minecraft attempted already, kicking off with an initial rendition for the Java version of the game that may well have served as an inspiration for the 'real deal'. However, while impressive as a starting point, it still used rasterisation for the geometry and for the first bounce of light, and as a consequence, shadows weren't ray traced either. All skinned objects were also rasterised, so screen-space reflections and screen-space global illumination were blended in to cover models and transparencies like grass. Effectively, only the bounce lighting was path traced, and only from the blocks.

Read more