Notes

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

When you think of Minecraft you may think of blocky graphics and simplistic textures. The beta launch of ray tracing capabilities on NVIDIA's RTX graphics cards has transformed it into an entirely new game. Ray tracing allows for more realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows. It's like jumping from shaky VHS tapes to HD.



I'll admit that I've never spent a lot of time playing Minecraft however, I've always regarded it as a creative tool for younger gamers. Partially I just did not have the patience to handle a huge unstructured game. And, to be honest I've never liked the appearance of the game. The aesthetics matter a lot when you're planning to spend hours in the virtual world (this is also why I didn't get into World of Warcraft). Ray tracing makes Minecraft more immersive.



The difference is obvious the first time you load one of the six environments from NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Worlds Pack. minecraft servers list Each of the six environments was designed by master Minecraft builders. When I started up Aquatic Adventure I was stunned by the reflections of the water and the transparency of crystal blocks. We've seen similar graphics from big budget titles like the Assassin's Creed series however, they've always felt like an approximation of real life. Although Minecraft's water blocks that were mirrored were flat and immobile it felt as if you were standing in front of a real lake.



Then there are the light rays that give the game the warm glow. It's almost as if you feel the sun kiss your face. These are large-scale light scattering effects that evoke the way sunlight shines through clouds. While they are not a good idea to overuse for example, like the way J.J. Abrams flings lens flares at all things, it was fascinating to see god rays with the ray tracer. The diffuse light looked so natural that I could not believe it was real-time rendering regardless of whether I was in the water or not.



While it may sound like I am just over the moon with the gorgeous graphics after spending hours playing the Minecraft beta I am more enthusiastic than ever about how Ray Tracing will transform the way we play games. Remedy's Control, for example it used ray tracing a mixed fashion where it worked in conjunction with traditional rendering techniques. We've seen ray-tracing at its fullest with the Minecraft beta and NVIDIA’s Quake 2 demo.



Ray tracing feels similar to HDR in that it's a new way to add depth and texture, regardless if it's rendered in 1080p or 4K. I've always found the rush to 4K to be a bit foolish. This is a lot of processing power to crunch more pixels. It's rarely noticeable from your couch, but it could be a significant improvement in performance when compared to 1440p and 1080p. I'm sure that a lot of gamers will place importance on frame rates and visible visual enhancements such as HDR and Ray Tracing above 4K rendering as monitors and TVs become more efficient. (But obviously, it is possible to meet all of these benchmarks in the future.



My big lesson from the Minecraft RTX beta? Realistic lighting can go a long way. It makes everything feel more real and immersive when lighting is from the direction it is required to go, and when shadows respond to the real world, and reflections appear exactly as you would expect. It's the difference between feeling like you're playing a video game, and experiencing the sensation of being in an actual world.



Unfortunately, ray tracing is still incredibly power hungry, and is not accessible to the majority of gamers. My test system is powered by a Core i7 8700K processor and an RTX2080 Ti. Minecraft slows down to 53 FPS at 1080p when ray tracing has been turned on. The hit is even greater on the less expensive RTX 2060. It's reduced to around 30 FPS according to NVIDIA benchmarks. That's where the company's DLSS technology is in. It uses AI powered rendering to produce higher quality results from lower-resolution images. After turning it on, Minecraft was able to be running at around 93FPS at 1080p. And NVIDIA promises to give the struggling RTX 2060 GPU a bump to around 53FPS.



Performance is less on RTX laptops which aren’t as powerful as their desktop counterparts. NVIDIA claims an RTX 2080 Max-Q laptop, similar to Acer's Triton 500, will hit 57 FPS in Minecraft with Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled. You can expect things to be slower on RTX 2060 or 2070 models because this is the top-of-the-line mobile GPU.



These limitations make me doubt that most games will go all-in on Ray Tracing anytime in the near future. However, not in the same way we've seen with Minecraft. I would also bet that the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X will face similar issues managing the performance of ray-tracing. It's nice to see developers experimenting 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 see.


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