Ray tracing is one of the most exciting graphical developments to happen to gaming in a long time. For those that hear ‘ray tracing’ as a term tossed around a lot, it’s basically a super cool advanced way of rendering lights and shadows. It simulates and tracks every last ray of light that’s produced from a light source, whether that’s the Sun or a lamp indoors.
Basically it’s a really cool advanced way of making lighting look as natural and real as possible. And it works really good! Which is exciting!
While Minecraft isn’t exactly the game that jumps to a lot of peoples minds when we say ‘implementing cutting edge graphic stuff’ and yet, here we are. NVIDIA has teamed up with Mojang Studios to bring RTX technology into the game with a free update, set to launch Thursday the 16th of April at 10am Pacific time.
It’s a complete graphical overhaul with players able to see those rays being traced and mine prettier minerals and materials. NVIDIA is also offering up six new worlds for players to download completely free on the Minecraft Marketplace, with each map designed to bring the best out of the RTX upgrade.
The only catch is, of course, players will need to be running the Windows 10 version of the game and using a GeForce RTX 2060 GPU or higher, as well as the latest NVIDIA Game Ready Driver.
The final version of Minecraft with RTX will come as a free update later in the year for users that own the game on Windows 10.
