Notes

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

When you think of Minecraft you may think of blocksy graphics and simple textures. However, the recent beta launch of ray tracing capabilities for NVIDIA's RTX graphics card transforms it into a completely different game. Ray tracing lets you create more realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows. It's like jumping from shaky VHS tapes into HD.



I'll admit, I've never spent a lot of time with Minecraft however, I've always respected it as an excellent tool for young gamers. It was partly because I didn't have the patience to play a massive unstructured game. And honestly, I just never really liked the way it looked. The aesthetics matter a lot when you're planning to spend hours in a virtual world (this is also why I never got into World of Warcraft). Ray tracing is a fundamental change to the Minecraft experience -- all suddenly it's more immersive.



The difference is evident the first time you load one of the six environments in NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Worlds Pack. The six environments were created by master Minecraft builders. When I started up Aquatic Adventure I was awestruck by the reflections of water and the transparency of crystal blocks. Similar visual effects are seen in high budget games like Assassin's Creed, however they always feel like an accurate representation of real life. Minecraft's mirrored water blocks, though flat and immobile were a little closer to staring at an actual lake.



The sun's rays also provide the game with the appearance of a warm glow. It's almost like feeling the sun on your face. These are diffused light effects that evoke the way sunlight shines through clouds. While they are not a good idea to overuse 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 whether I was underwater or simply looking at trees from above the diffuse light looked so stunning I almost believed it was being rendered in real time.



It might appear like I'm gushing over pretty graphics however, after spending hours in this Minecraft beta I'm more enthusiastic than ever about how ray tracing technology will alter how we experience games. Recent games like Remedy's Control used ray tracing in a hybrid manner, where it worked alongside traditional rendering techniques. Going full tilt in ray tracing is something we've only seen presented in the past with this Minecraft beta and NVIDIA's RTX enabled Quake 2 demo.



Ray tracing is similar to HDR in that it's a new way to add depth and texture, regardless whether it's rendered in 1080p or 4K. Mega blog I've always found the move to 4K to be foolhardy. There's a lot of processing power that is being used to crunch more pixels, even though you may not see a dramatic difference in contrast to 1,440p or 1080p -- particularly from your couch. I'm sure that a lot of gamers will be focusing on framerates and visual enhancements like HDR and Ray Tracing over 4K rendering as TVs and monitors are getting faster. (But, of course, it is possible to meet all of these benchmarks eventually.



My main conclusion from the Minecraft RTX beta? Realistic lighting can go a long way. Everything is more real when light comes from the right direction and when shadows respond in a realistic manner and reflections appear exactly just as you would expect. It's the difference between feeling like you're playing a video game, and feeling like you're in a virtual world.



Ray tracing remains extremely power-hungry and not accessible to most gamers. On my test system, that is powered by a Core i7 8700K CPU and an RTX 2080 Ti, Minecraft slows down to 53FPS at 1080p when the ray tracing feature is enabled. The impact is even more for the less expensive RTX 2060. It slows down to about 30 FPS according to NVIDIA benchmarks. This is the point where the company's DLSS tech comes into play. It uses AI-powered rendering to create higher quality results from images with lower resolution. Once I flipped that on, Minecraft jumped to around 93FPS at 1080p on my system. NVIDIA claims it will give the struggling RTX 2060 GPU an additional 53FPS.



Performance is lower on RTX laptops which aren’t as powerful as desktop counterparts. NVIDIA claims that an RTX 2080 Max Q machine, similar to Acer's Triton 500 laptop, will achieve 57 FPS in Minecraft with Ray Tracing enabled and DLSS enabled. Since it's the top of the line mobile GPU it is likely to be a lot slower on RTX 2060 and 2070 machines.



With these limitations, I don't think that many games to go all-in with Ray Tracing anytime soon- certainly not in the manner we've seen in Minecraft. And I'd wager the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, both of which run AMD's forthcoming Radeon hardware, will experience similar issues managing the performance of ray-tracing. It's great to see developers experimenting with this new technology. Don't get caught up in the rush to 4K -- we'll judge future games by how well they implement graphics and ray tracing you'll actually notice.


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