About Nvidia Ray Tracing GTX & RTX in Minecraft

Minecraft with RTX called Minecraft RTX is not officially available for all players with Windows 10. The Minecraft with RTX Windows 10 beta was released by both Mojang and Microsoft. This one is defined as a special insider standalone client that introduced stunning path traced ray tracing to the most popular game in the world, Minecraft. From now on, both ray tracing and DLSS are available to all.

If you want to experience the amazing sights accelerated by NVIDIA DLSS, you can just download and install the newest version of Minecraft for Windows 10 from the official website of Microsoft. Then, go to the Minecraft Marketplace and download a free showcase world and load into it.

Overview

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Everyone is able to play all ray tracing worlds and maps on Realms ad servers with your friends or the other gamers by using cross platform Minecraft game client. You and your friends or the other players can make a collaboration, build and explore together.

By default, Minecraft with RTX players will be able to see everything enhanced by a special texture pack called Physically Based Rendering texture that interplays with the ray traced effects to further enhance your experience. As for those who are playing on the other platforms, they will see the standard visual of Minecraft.

The power of ray tracing and Physically Based Rendering can be used to build stunning scenes with lighting, shadows, and effects running at levels of details that cannot be seen before and accuracy, helping you to make the worlds that no one can imagine.

What’s new

In order to demonstrate the possibilities of ray tracing of Minecraft, Nvidia has collaborated with some creators to make a free ray traced world. Each of them has their own unique textures, designs, and game mechanics. For everyone who is curious about the collaboration between Nvidia and a few creators, feel free to download these from the Minecraft Marketplace in game.

When ray tracing was announced for the first time, it was only open to the ones who play the games with the newest Nvidia graphics cards in their gaming machine. The RTX 20 series cards were used to be the only one that were capable of supporting ray tracing and DLSS. The list is not complete even though the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060/Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070/Nvidia RTX GeForce 2080 or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti were included.

All the graphics cards mentioned above are also pricey and put ray tracing out of range of most gamers, with the exception if they were willing to splash out for cutting edge tech.

Capable graphics cards

Everything has changed since April 2019 when the company announced that the ray tracing would be supported on the older GPUs with the newest game ready drivers. Here is the current list of older ray tracing capable graphics cards:

• GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
• GeForce GTX 1660
• Nvidia Titan Xp (2017)
• GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
• GeForce GTX 1080
• GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
• GeForce GTX 1070
• GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

The ones that support ray tracing are not just gaming desktops. Each laptop with equivalent Pascal and Turning architecture GPUs are also counted on the list. There are also a few gaming laptops with RTX GPUs included as a specification option. And the list goes on.

Ray tracing does not only revolve around the PC. It is said that the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 support ray tracing. With that being said, it is better for you to keep in mind that if you want to get the best experiences with ray tracing, then you will need the best hardware.

Despite the fact that the older graphics cards also now support ray tracing, they will have a hard time with performance. The old GTX GPUs can only give the basic ray tracing effects that have a low ray count. If you compare them to RTX graphics processors, they are left behind because the RTX graphics processors are able to manage much more complex effects with more than one effect being presented with a higher ray count.

Ray tracing is also known as a graphically intensive thing. If you turn it on and maximize the settings, even the gaming PCs with highest specs can see a dip in performance in terms of frames per second shown on the screen.

You will get a visually pretty gaming experience, but it will not always be smooth. The impact maximum settings are even shown by Nvidia. They are the ones that can have on average FPS at some different resolutions and even at 1920 and 1080 these figures are around 30FPS on older GTX GPUs. So, it is better for you to use RTX graphics cards if you are able to afford it.

There are some notable improvements in the performance of the later RTX 3000 series graphics cards even with ray tracing turned on.

Supported

Minecraft RTX is not the only one that currently supports ray tracing. Aside from Minecraft RTX, some other ones include Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Battlefield V, MechWarrior 5, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Quake II, Metro Exodus, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Control, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Ghostrunner, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Watch Dogs: Legion, and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.

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In case you are still not sure whether ray tracing is for you and whether you need to get a new graphics card or gaming machine, then here is good news for you. There is a list of the upcoming PC games that will support ray tracing. The list includes Pumpkin Jack, Stay in the Light, Ready or Not, Atomic Heart, Enlisted, Justice, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, Sword and Fairy 7, and Dying Light 2.

For more information about these upcoming releases, you are encouraged to visit the official website of Nvidia regularly as well as following the official social media accounts of Nvidia. Besides, it is also better for you to join the communities or forums related to Nvidia and those games.