Notes

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

When you think of Minecraft, you probably imagine blocky graphics and simplistic textures. However, the recent beta launch of ray tracing capabilities for NVIDIA's RTX graphics cards transforms it into an entirely new game. Ray tracing can provide more realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows. It's like jumping from shaky VHS tapes into HD.



I'll admit, I've never spent much time playing Minecraft although I've always respected it as an innovative tool for younger gamers. It was partly because I didn't have enough patience to handle an unstructured, massive game. Minecraft-servers.Site Also, I didn't like the way it looked. If you're planning to spend hours in a virtual world aesthetics are vital. This is why I didn't get into World of Warcraft. But ray tracing has a profound effect on the Minecraft experience -- all suddenly it's more immersive.



The difference is obvious 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. Aquatic Adventure's water reflections and transparency were awe-inspiring to me when I first picked playing. We've seen similar visual effects from big budget games like the Assassin's Creed series, but they've always felt like an approximation of reality. Although Minecraft's mirrored water blocks were flat and in motion it felt as if you were in a real lake.



The sunlight's rays provide the game with a warm glow. It's almost as if you feel the sun kiss your face. These are volumetric light scattering effects that evoke the way that 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 awe-inspiring to see god rays using the ray tracer. It didn't matter if I was in the ocean or just looking up at trees the diffuse light was so beautiful I was awestruck that it was being rendered in real time.



It might appear like I'm talking about beautiful graphics, but after spending hours in this Minecraft beta I'm more excited than ever before about how ray tracing will change the way we play games. Remedy's Control, for example utilized ray tracing in a mixed fashion where it worked alongside traditional rendering techniques. We've seen ray tracing in its most complete form with the Minecraft beta and NVIDIA's Quake 2 demo.



Ray tracing can be compared to HDR in that it can add texture and depth to your image regardless of whether it's rendered at 1080p or 4K. I find the rush to 4K to be a little naive. This is lots of processing power utilized to process more pixels, though you might not always see a huge difference compared to 1,440p or 1080p -- especially from your couch. I'm betting that many gamers will place importance on framerates and visual enhancements such as HDR and Ray Tracing over 4K rendering as monitors and TVs become more efficient. (But of course, the dream is to meet all those benchmarks at some point.)



My biggest lesson from the Minecraft RTX beta? Realistic lighting is a huge help. Everything feels more immersive when light comes from the right direction, when shadows respond realistically and reflections appear like you'd expect. It's the difference between feeling as if you're playing a game and the sensation of entering an actual virtual world.



Ray tracing is still extremely power-hungry and unaccessible for most gamers. On my test rig, which is powered by a Core i7 8700K CPU and an RTX 2080 Ti, Minecraft slows down to around 53FPS at 1080p when ray tracing is turned on. The hit is greater on the less expensive RTX 2060, which falls to around 30 FPS according to NVIDIA's benchmarks. This is where the company's DLSS technology is in. It utilizes AI powered rendering to deliver superior quality results using lower resolution images. After turning it on, Minecraft jumped to around 93FPS at 1080p on my system. NVIDIA claims that it will give the struggling RTX 2060 GPU an additional 53FPS.



Performance is also lower on RTX laptops, which aren't nearly as powerful as desktop siblings. NVIDIA claims that an RTX 2080 Max-Q machine, similar to Acer's Triton 500, will hit 57 FPS in Minecraft with Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled. As it's the company's top of the line mobile GPU, you can expect things to be considerably slower for RTX 2060 and 2070 models.



Given these limitations, I don't expect many games to go all-in on 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 be running AMD's forthcoming Radeon hardware, will experience similar difficulties 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 future games based on how they use Ray Tracing and other graphical enhancements that you'll be able to see.


Homepage: https://minecraft-servers.site/