Minecraft supports ray tracing

Microsoft and Nvidia have announced ray tracing support for Minecraft. Accordingly, if you have a Windows 10 PC with GeForce RTX GPU, you can enjoy realistic graphics by simulating the appearance of the sun scattering in the air, refracting light from water and ice blocks, or shining on metal blocks.

Ray tracing is a graphics technique most introduced in next-generation PC games. This is a method of expressing light and shadows close to reality, such as reflection, refraction, and scattering, by calculating the color of each pixel.

In the existing computer game graphics, no matter how close the expressions such as shadows and water appear to reality, it was important to reduce the amount of computation internally possible and to trick them into showing similar results or to easily display similar results. For this reason, expressions such as shadows and reflections that should have been originally the same light property were also reproduced separately. This is one of the reasons why there are so many items on the graphic setting screen.

Ray tracing makes it possible to perform graphic expressions that have been individually processed so far in principle to simulate the nature of light itself, with a unified sense of reality. Minecraft’s studio Mojang and Nvidia have jointly announced a version that incorporates fast racing into Minecraft.

Minecraft features simple texture drawing on coarse blocks. Distant blocks look like fog in layers with complex light scattering, or walls near colorful carpets are subtly stained with light reflected off the floor. Water blocks are not only reflected, but also reflected from the surface of the water and refraction occurs.

On NVIDIA’s high-end GPU, GeForce RTX, Microsoft supports the latest graphics API, DirectX R, so you can expect ray tracing in various fields as well as games. In fact, some games also introduce ray tracing. Moreover, as it is loved by a wide range of age groups as the world’s best-selling game, this change may be one of the factors that will lead to the purchase of GeForce RTX.

Of course, you might ask if Minecraft needs such a realistic light expression, leaving Nvidia or Microsoft’s intentions. However, Minecraft has previously incorporated light intensity and attenuation factors. If light reflections and refractions that reproduce ray tracing are introduced into the physical laws of the Minecraft world, it makes enough sense that the appearance of the game itself becomes beautiful, and the advantage of being able to grasp the sense of distance and environment can be expected.

Minecraft’s ray tracing requires a Windows 10 PC and a GeForce RTX GPU. In 2020, it is expected to be able to choose to enable ray tracing using RTX as a beta option. In the future, in addition to GeForce RTX, it is planning to expand the platform for DirectX R.

Simultaneously with the release of ray tracing, Microsoft announced a new game engine, Render Dragon. Render Dragon is a new game engine that realizes graphics enhancements and performance improvements for hardware, including ray tracing. Minecraft is expected to update to adopt Render Dragons in the coming months. The AR version of Minecraft Earth is already based on Render Dragon. Ray tracing is not possible on all platforms, but graphics can be expected on most models. Related information can be found here .