When talking about high-fidelity visuals that impress in terms of technical features, one doesn’t usually mention Minecraft. Unless of course it’s about how a group recreated the entirety of Lord of the Rings’ Middle-earth in-game. As one of the most popular games of all-time, with over 176 million copies sold, that hasn’t stopped several mods and user-made tools being created that add real-time raytracing. Often with stunning results. And much like the overhaul seen with Quake II RTX, it’s now official – NVIDIA GeForce RTX-powered raytracing is coming to Minecraft.

The free update, will open up Minecraft to more realistic shadows, lighting and vibrant colours made possible using the ground-breaking tech. As with the Quake II RTX update, NVIDIA and Mojang are adding path tracing (a form of raytracing) to the Windows 10 version of the game. It will be used as a unified model to calculate lighting in the game for various effects, including reflections, shadows, and more.

Here’s a breakdown using the latest in technical graphics speak.

Direct lighting from the sun, sky and various light sources, including emissive surfaces such as glowstone and lava

Realistic hard and soft shadows depending on the size, shape and distance of the light source

Per-pixel emissive lighting

Indirect diffuse illumination (diffuse global illumination)

Indirect specular illumination (reflections)

Transparent materials with reflection, refraction and scattering (stained glass, water, ice)

Atmospheric scattering and density (volumetric fog, light shafts, realistic sky)

And here’s the trailer – which shows the remarkable difference between RTX On and RTX Off. So much so that it alters the look of the game in quite a substantial way, making it seem like you took Minecraft’s graphics and made them feel real.



“Minecraft will expose ray tracing to millions of gamers of all ages and backgrounds that may not play more hardcore video games,” said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. “The world’s best-selling video game adding ray tracing on PC illustrates the momentum that ray tracing has built in the gaming ecosystem.”

“Ray tracing sits at the center of what we think is next for Minecraft,” added Saxs Persson, franchise creative director of Minecraft at Microsoft. “GeForce RTX gives the Minecraft world a brand-new feel to it. In normal Minecraft, a block of gold just appears yellow, but with ray tracing turned on, you really get to see the specular highlight, you get to see the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in it.”

No word on when the update will be made available, so stay tuned on that front.