DXR Raytracing is coming to Minecraft – RTX On

DXR Raytracing is coming to Minecraft - RTX On

DXR Raytracing is coming to Minecraft – RTX On

One week ago, Mojang announced that Minecraft’s “Super Duper Graphics” pack had been cancelled, over two years after the pack was originally promised. Now, it looks like the pack is making its return, kinda, in the form of Minecraft RTX. 

That’s right, DXR raytracing is coming to the DirectX 12 version of Minecraft, enabling users of DXR compatible graphics cards to enable real-time global illumination. DXR allows Mojang to deliver lighting effects which are impossible in the game’s earlier iterations. At the time of writing, Nvidia’s RTX series of graphics cards are the only GPUs that offer support for hardware-accelerated raytracing. This makes Nvidia Mojang’s obvious choice in hardware partner. 

The use of Microsoft’s DXR API will ensure that Minecraft’s RTX version will be usable with future DXR compatible graphics cards. This will include future DXR compatible GPUs from both Intel and AMD, though it is worth noting that game patches may be required to enable his extended support. It is also likely that this new DXR enabled version of Minecraft was built with Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox Scarlett console in mind. Project Scarlett is due to release with support for hardware-accelerated raytracing. 

 
 
We couldn’t be more excited to take advantage of the new ray tracing technology from NVIDIA. It’ll be playable on Windows 10 with devices that are capable of DirectX R, such as with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU (and we plan to expand it to future platforms that support DirectX R raytracing).  

DXR Minecraft is due to release as part of a free update sometime in the future. Neither Microsoft or Nvidia have given the patch a clear release date. Please watch the trailer below to see Minecraft DXR in action. 

Nvidia has confirmed that this version of Minecraft will be entirely path-traced, making it one of the first games to officially do so. Mojang has confirmed that they plan to support non-Nvidia DXR hardware once it becomes available. The release of Minecraft DXR/RTX is planned for 2020. 
 

    Mojang and NVIDIA are bringing jaw-dropping DXR ray tracing to the world’s most popular game enabling lifelike lighting, reflections, shadows, and much more.

With raytracing, lighting is upgraded to real-time global illumination, emissive blocks like Glowstone and Lava can illuminate environments, water, glass and other reflective surfaces show accurate real-time reflections and shading and shadowing gains lifelike accuracy. And on it goes, because the entire game is enhanced with ray tracing.

You can join the discussion on Minecraft’s upcoming DXR/RTX patch on the OC3D Forums.Â