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Minecraft-RTX-Feature

Last week, Mojang announced that the Minecraft Super Duper Graphics Pack (SDGP) that Microsoft had promised back in 2017 was canceled, permanently. No boosted information was offered on why the update was canceled, or what the squad had been working on for the past two years before canceling it. As of today, Nvidia has announced that information technology will be developing an exclusive ray tracing pack for Minecraft for Nvidia GPU owners.

Mojang's proclamation states: "It'll be playable on Windows 10 with devices that are capable of DirectX R, such as with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU (and we plan to expand information technology to future platforms that back up DirectX R raytracing)."

Presumably, DirectX R is a reference to DXR, which is the official name for DirectX ray tracing. RTX is Nvidia's brand-name for its implementation of the Microsoft DXR standard. We imagine AMD will introduce its ain branding or simply employ the DXR moniker when it launches support. Speaking of AMD, we don't know if the "future platforms" is a reference to systems similar the PS5 and Xbox Adjacent or whether it'due south a reference to Big Navi, which is expected to debut next year.

"Ray tracing sits at the center of what we think is side by side for Minecraft," said Saxs Persson, head creative manager for Minecraft at Microsoft. "GeForce RTX gives the Minecraft globe a make-new feel to it. In normal Minecraft, a block of gold just appears yellow, but with ray tracing turned on, you really become to see the specular highlight, you go to run into the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in information technology."

Minecraft-RTX-versus-Off

The screenshot higher up shows the affect of having RTX enabled versus disabled, with the divider halfway down the screen. RTX-enabled is on the right.

At that place'south likely a relationship betwixt the counterfoil of the SDGP and Nvidia's annunciation that it will provide a path tracing solution for Minecraft, but there'due south no indication of what the exact human relationship was. The SDGP was in evolution for a long time and Mojang was always very tight-lipped about its progress. Developer advice on this point, when it occurred, amounted to "goose egg to written report, full engine updates are very complicated and you'll come across it when it's closer to washed than it is now."

Information technology's possible that Nvidia saw the piece of work being done by third-party modders to integrate ray tracing into Minecraft, was inspired by information technology, and reached out to Mojang about the possibility directly. Only even if Mojang liked the thought, information technology's highly unlikely that the visitor would cancel two years worth of work on its own overhaul. But all of this is rather confusing because Mojang announced the launch of its own new rendering pipeline as office of its overall RTX graphics carteSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce support. The Bedrock version of Minecraft will be updated with a new graphics rendering pipeline, codenamed Render Dragon.

In other words: When Microsoft announced the Super Duper Graphics Pack, it announced that the SDGP would be introduced alongside a new graphics engine implemented in the Bedrock version of the game. Earlier this year, we covered an extensive path tracing Minecraft modern that turned the game into a vision of beauty. Now, Nvidia has cutting a deal with Mojang to build an RTX-powered version of the game and Mojang has killed the SDGP, but will even so innovate the updated rendering engine the SDGP was expected to employ.

If we had to guess, we'd guess that Mojang'south comments about DXR compatibility refer to other consoles, or at least the Xbox Adjacent. Nvidia isn't going to do any work to provide ray tracing support on a non-Nvidia GPU, but Microsoft is unlikely to invest heavily in a ray-tracing update for Minecraft that tin't run on its own Xbox Next. Whatever gets hammered out between them, it wouldn't surprise us if AMD GPU customers who don't game on consoles are out of luck with this one. Modders have already created a path-traced version of Minecraft that looks boggling, and so at least third-party options will continue to be bachelor.

The RTX-powered version of Minecraft should make it erstwhile in 2020. Hopefully, Nvidia will pay better attention to functioning optimization than information technology did in Quake 2 — that particular game runs quite slowly, despite the age of the underlying engine. Minecraft's greatest forcefulness is its ability to play on anything, and equally great as information technology is to run across features like path tracing, we hope Nvidia can offer them without destroying performance. Features like 4K support, which was a major capability of the SDGP, take not been mentioned.

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