Minecraft's Ray-tracing Beta is Available on PC this Week

Minecraft has been a hugely popular game for the past ten years. Now, ray tracing is giving it a new look. This is the most sought-after feature of gaming graphics that simulates the physical properties of light, bringing real-time, cinematic-quality rendering into games.

NVIDIA announced that it was developing realistic graphics for Minecraft in a previous year. They will now be available to Windows players from April 16th. Currently in beta, the release will feature the classic Minecraft single-player experience, but with ray-traced reflections, shadows, lighting, and custom-designed realistic materials. In addition, you'll be able explore six new RTX worlds developed by community creators. The worlds include Aquatic Adventure and Imagination Island, as well as Neon District. They are free to Minecraft Windows 10 gamers who use the Minecraft Marketplace.

Additionally, the release that is focused on visuals comes with physically-based rendering (PBR), which means surfaces are set to look a lot more realistic, whether they're rough matte stone or glossy smooth ice, and to aid in the work required to run all this in the background as well, there's NVIDIA's DLS 2.0. This latest version of NVIDIA's AI upscaler makes use of RTX tensor cores to take a lower-res image and upscale it to your target resolution, which is said to do better than the original feature that launched alongside NVIDIA's RTX cards.

Since it's in beta, you should expect a few issues at this point. The beta does not include certain features, like multiplayer realms, third-party servers, or cross-play. There are still a few design bugs, and some dimensions have not yet been optimized for the ray tracing. Banners are still black and the slime mob does not have a face. These are issues that will be addressed in due time. The official release date hasn't yet been set. Developers would like to hear from the public about the beta release.

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