Minecraft may not be the most visually stunning game, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a quaint beauty to its blocky world. And with RTX ray tracing on, Minecraft becomes an even more lovely sight.
In the video above, we explore a free Minecraft world, both with RTX ray tracing turned off and on. It’s immediately clear just how much of a difference the feature makes, even with a game that’s as visually simple as Minecraft. The biggest obvious difference is with the lighting–with RTX enabled, each individual light source (from city lights to glowing lava) shines in its own way and casts different shades of shadow.
If you want to check out Minecraft’s stunning transformation for yourself, the Minecraft RTX open beta is now live. That said, it’s only available on the Windows 10 Bedrock version of the game, and you’ll need a compatible Nvidia GPU to enable RTX.
In the simplest terms, ray tracing allows a game to showcase lighting more realistically. It’s a power-hungry feature to have though, which is why it’s primarily existed in the PC space up to this point. However, both Microsoft and Sony are implementing ray tracing support in their respective next-gen consoles, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
