Minecrafts Raytracing Beta Arrives On PC This Week

Ten years since its release and Minecraft remains one of the most played games of our times and now, it's getting a makeover by Ray Tracing. This is the most sought-after feature of gaming graphics, which simulates the physical behavior of light to provide real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to the game.

NVIDIA first revealed it was working on realistic graphics for Minecraft last year - now they're scheduled to release to Windows players on April 16th. The beta version is currently in development. release will be the familiar Minecraft single-player experience, except with ray-traced reflections, shadows, lighting and customized, realistic materials. Six brand new RTX worlds have been created by community members. 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 will appear more realistic, whether they're rough matte stone or glossy smooth ice and to aid in the grunt work needed to run all this and to make it all work, there's NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0. This new version of NVIDIA's AI upscaler uses RTX Tensor cores to process an image with a lower resolution and then upscale it to your target resolution, purportedly doing a much better job than the first version that was launched with NVIDIA's RTX cards.

It is still in beta and you can expect some issues. Certain features aren't included in the beta, for example, such as multiplayer realms, third-party servers, or cross-play. Dhaka's blog There are still a few design bugs and certain dimensions aren't yet optimized for ray tracing. Banners are black, and the slime mob does not have an appearance. These are things that will be fixed in the near future. The date has not yet confirmed for official release. Developers hope to get feedback from the community on the beta release first.