Earlier this year, Mojang announced the launch of a new graphical feature coming to Minecraft in collaboration with the graphic hardware powerhouse Nvidia. This new update adds ray tracing to Minecraft, giving the blocky, pixilated graphics a complete overhaul with RTX, massively enhancing lighting effects across all areas of the game.
The ray tracing was originally beta tested in April, with a select few PC players able to run Minecraft with the new graphical improvements on Windows 10. However, Mojang has now moved on from that initial beta and the update is available to all PC players running the game with Windows 10 right now.
Showing off the new ray tracing update in a video uploaded to the official Minecraft YouTube channel, Mojang has outdone itself with the incredible effects of the new graphical overhaul. The most notable change in the game is obviously the lighting effects, which is the major focus of ray tracing in general, enhancing how a game world looks by adding more realistic and organic illumination. These types of graphics have become a major selling point for some games, and even hardware like Nvidia's RTX 30 series GPUs, which Mojang created this new update to work in tandem with.
At the moment, the ray tracing update is only available in Minecraft for players on PC with Windows 10 and that have a strong enough GPU to handle the strenuous feature. However, earlier demos of ray tracing on Xbox Series X might imply that Mojang has plans to bring the feature over to consoles, even if it may only be available on next-gen hardware. Considering the extra power required to run these programs, it's likely that older consoles simply wouldn't be able to run the feature, so PS4 and Xbox One players are seemingly out of luck in this area.
Of course, this isn't the first time that ray tracing has made its way onto Mojang's top-selling game, even if it wasn't the developer that introduced the feature in the first place. The Minecraft modding community has created dozens of intense graphical improvements over the years, some of which have included ray tracing, often as a way to improve ambient light. However, with Mojang releasing an official update to run the feature, this latest version will likely be the most stable way that players can enhance their Minecraft experience without needing to rely on third party sources to get the most out of RTX.
Minecraft is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.