Notes

'Minecraft' Looks like a whole new Game with NVIDIA's RTX Ray Tracing

When you think of Minecraft you might think of simple graphics and simple textures. The beta launch of ray tracing capabilities on NVIDIA's RTX graphic cards has turned it into an entirely new game. To put it simply it allows for more realistic lighting, reflections and shadows. It's like jumping from grainy VHS tapes to HD.



Although I have to admit that I haven't spent much time playing Minecraft I do appreciate it as a creative tool for younger gamers. It was partly because I didn't have the patience to play a massive unstructured game, and honestly I never liked the look of it. If you plan on spending hours in a virtual environment aesthetics are crucial. This is why I didn't get into World of Warcraft. Ray tracing is a fundamental change to the Minecraft experience -- all of a sudden , it's more immersive.



The difference is evident the first time you load up one of the six environments included in NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Worlds pack, each of which was created by master Minecraft builders. When I first started Aquatic Adventure, I was gobsmacked by the reflections of the water and the clarity of the crystal blocks. We've seen similar graphics from big budget titles like the Assassin's Creed series, but they've always felt as an exact replica of reality. Minecraft's mirrored water blocks even though they were flat and unmoving seemed a little closer to staring at a real lake.



The rays of sunlight also give the game the appearance of a warm glow. You can almost feel the sun on your face. These are "god rays"" large-scale light scattering effects that are designed to mimic the way sunlight shines through clouds. Although they are sometimes overused, such as the way J.J. Abrams is notorious for throwing flares onto everything, seeing god rays deployed realistically with ray tracing was simply breathtaking. It didn't matter if I was in the ocean or just looking up at trees the diffuse light looked so stunning I almost didn't believe it was being rendered in real time.



Although it could seem like I'm just giddy about the beautiful graphics after spending hours playing this Minecraft beta I am more excited than ever about the way that Ray Tracing can transform the way we experience games. Recent games like Remedy's Control used ray tracing in a hybrid manner which was used in conjunction with traditional rendering techniques. Full tilt in the ray tracing process is something we've only seen demonstrated so far in this Minecraft beta and NVIDIA's RTX enabled Quake 2 demo.



Ray tracing is similar to HDR in that it's a new method to add depth and texture, no matter if it's rendered in 1080p or 4K. I've always found the rush to 4K to be foolish. This is an enormous amount of processing power utilized to process more pixels, even though you might not always see a dramatic difference compared to 1,440p or 1080p especially from your couch. As TVs and monitors move towards higher refresh rates, I'd imagine many gamers will prioritize frame rates and noticeable visual enhancements like HDR and ray tracing above rendering in 4K. (But, of course, it is possible to meet all of these benchmarks in the future.



My main conclusion from the Minecraft RTX beta? Realistic lighting is a huge help. It's more immersive when light comes from the direction it should, when shadows respond realistically and reflections appear exactly like you'd expect. It's the difference between feeling as though you're playing a video game or experiencing the sensation of being in a virtual world.



Unfortunately the ray tracing technology is incredibly power hungry, and not accessible to all gamers. My test setup is powered by a Core i7 8700K processor and an RTX2080 Ti. Minecraft slows down to 53FPS with ray tracing turned on. And the hit is even bigger on the more affordable RTX 2060, which falls to 30 FPS, according to NVIDIA's benchmarks. This is where the company's DLSS technology is in. It makes use of AI-powered rendering to produce superior quality results using lower resolution images. When I switched it on, Minecraft jumped to around 93FPS in 1080p on my system. And NVIDIA says it'll give that struggling RTX 2060 GPU a bump to 53FPS.



Performance is worse on RTX laptops that aren't as powerful as desktop siblings. NVIDIA claims that an RTX 2080 Max Q laptop like Acer's Triton 500 laptop, will get 57 FPS on Minecraft with ray tracing enabled and DLSS enabled. Expect things to be slower for RTX 2060 or 2070 models since this is the top-of-the-line mobile GPU.



With these limitations, I don't think that many games to fully embrace ray tracing anytime soon -certainly not in the way we've seen in Minecraft. And I'd wager the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X both of which will run AMD's forthcoming Radeon hardware, will face similar problems coping with ray tracing performance. Chit chat chit chat It's great to see developers trying out this new technology. Don't get caught up in the rush to 4K. We'll be judging future games based on how well they implement Ray Tracing and other graphical improvements that you'll see.


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