This Week, Minecraft's Ray-tracing Beta Beta Is Now Available On PC
Minecraft has been a wildly loved game for the last ten years. The ray tracing technology has given it a fresh look. This is the holy grail of gaming graphics, which mimics the physical behaviour of light, bringing real-time, cinematic quality rendering to the game.
NVIDIA announced that it was working on realistic graphics for Minecraft in the previous year. They will now be available to Windows users from April 16th. The beta version is currently in beta. It will include the familiar Minecraft single-player experience with shadows and reflections that are ray-traced as well as lighting and custom, realistic materials. Additionally, you'll be able to explore six new RTX worlds that were created by community creators. These include Aquatic Adventure and Imagination Island, as well as Neon District. They are free for Minecraft Windows 10 gamers who use the Minecraft Marketplace.
Elsewhere, the visually-focused release comes with physically-based rendering (PBR), which means surfaces are set to look more realistic, regardless of whether they're rough stone or glossy smooth ice and to help with the grunt work needed to power all of this and to make it all work, there's NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0. This latest version of NVIDIA's AI upscaler utilizes RTX Tensor cores to process a lower-res image and upscale it to your target resolution, supposedly doing a much better job than the initial feature that was released with NVIDIA's RTX cards.
It's still in beta so there could be some glitches. The beta does not include certain features, like multiplayer realms, third-party servers, or cross-play. There are design issues and dimensions that aren't optimized for Ray-tracing. In addition, banners are black, and slime mob has no face. Minecraftservers are the kinds of things that will be ironed out in the near future. The exact date for release has yet to be confirmed for official release - developers are hoping to collect feedback from the community on the beta release first.