Nvidia teams up with Minecraft Creators to showcase the game in its full path-traced glory

Nvidia teams up with Minecraft Creators to showcase the game in its full path-traced glory

Nvidia teams up with Minecraft Creators to showcase the game in its full path-traced glory 

Path-tracing is coming to Minecraft, and with it will come truly next-generation visuals and a glimpse of what is to come for future PC releases. Today, Nvidia has offered gamers a detailed look at “Minecraft with RTX”, an upcoming version of Minecraft which will provide DXR raytracing and physically-based textures to the Windows 10 version of Minecraft. 

The killer feature of Minecraft’s RTX/DXR outing is its use of path retracing, a feature which enabled ray-traced reflections, shadows, caustics, global illumination, and other realistic lighting effects.    

At this time, Minecraft’s path-traced version has no release date on PC, though Nvidia claims that it is coming “soon”. To prepare for the game’s release, Nvidia has teamed up with the creators Razzleberries, BlockWorks and GeminiTay to showcase how path-tracing can impact the visuals offered by Minecraft. The screenshots below showcase these maps with raytracing enabled and disabled. 

The first of these maps is from Razzleberries, titles “Of Temples and Totems RTX”, an adventure world that focuses on player exploration and the completion of challenges and other tasks. Each room highlights Minecraft RTX’s real-time shadows and global illumination, showcasing the graphical prowess of Minecraft’s upcoming raytracing-enabled version. 
 

The next map that Nvidia showcased is from GeminiTay, and it is called Crystal Palace, which highlights the Volumetric lighting that’s added by Minecraft’s RTX/DXR enabled version. The map features a fully-built castle which was made with a 1:1 scale. 

Lastly, we have “Imagination Island” from BlockWorks, an explorable theme park which is filled with areas which showcase the Minecraft’s coming raytracing potential in a good light. The map is said to be filled with easter eggs and host “four distinct lands”. 

With this information dump, Nvidia has also reminded is that its technical talks for Minecraft RTX are now available to view online. This includes tutorials for Minecraft veterans to convert their java-based world to today’s Minecraft Bedrock Windows 10 edition, which will make these maps ray-tracing ready once Minecraft RTX is released, and a texturing guide which will help Minecraft modders create their own PBR textures. 

 Best practices for converting Java worlds to RTX worlds
– Creating PBR textures how-to guide

For more technically minded gamers, Nvidia has also released several technical talks which detail Minecraft’s path-tracer and PBR-enabled textures. 

– Minecraft with RTX: Crafting a Real-Time Path-Tracer for Gaming video
– Creating Physically Based Materials for Minecraft with RTX video

You can join the discussion on Minecraft with RTX on the OC3D Forums.Â