Minecraft With RTX Teased With Breathtaking Comparison Screenshots [Update]

Update: The Minecraft RTX open beta is now live. It is only available on the Windows 10 Bedrock version of the game.

Original story follows:

Nvidia's solution for ray-tracing has been implemented only in parts in most big-budget releases. Battlefield 5 utilizes it for reflections, while Metro: Exodus uses it instead more realistic shadows and ambient occlusion. Very few games use ray-tracing throughout their rendering, which is why Minecraft with RTX is such a big step forward for the technology. It will be coming to open beta on April 16.

Coming soon to Windows versions of the game, Minecraft with RTX is one of the first big tests for full ray-traced rendering, following the likes of Quake II RTX from last year. Its worlds are fully path-traced, meaning every shadow, reflection, illumination and effect is bounced off of physically based textures that are applied to every one of Minecraft's many blocks. (We also recently saw Minecraft ray tracing in the form of an Xbox Series X tech demo, but the feature isn't confirmed for that platform.)

It's impressive technology that truly has to be seen to be believed, which is why Nvidia drafted three Minecraft creators to show off the benefits of RTX in three differently lit scenes. Below you can see screenshots from creators Razzleberries, BlockWorks and GeminiTay respectively, showing how the enhanced lighting note only illuminates structures in new ways, but adds a sense of vibrancy to them thanks to the per-pixel ambient light calculations from reflections.

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Minecraft with RTX will require a copy of Minecraft: Bedrock Edition on Windows 10 to function. If you're still creating worlds in Minecraft's Java versions, there is an unofficial way to migrate your worlds into the Windows version, with Bedrock already providing some nice visual updates of its own.