Minecraft's ray tracing feature for Windows 10 has made its way out of beta just eight months after the feature was first made available for testers. The inclusion of ray tracing capabilities for NVIDIA's RTX graphics cards transforms the sandbox game's aesthetics to one that's, well, better looking. As we mentioned in our hands-on review earlier this year the realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows that this feature can bring make Minecraft feel more immersive. While the game is unreal, the in-game lighting is real-looking. Shadows and reflections can make it appear like you're actually there.
To be able to enjoy the benefits of ray tracing to the game, you'll need to play it on a computer using a GPU from NVIDIA that's capable of rendering rays. Only maps and worlds that utilize a physical-based rendering texture pack will benefit from the benefits. You don't need to do anything, as it's already enabled by default. Others who don't have the feature will be able to view the worlds in the game’s standard visuals.
NVIDIA announced that ray tracing puts more stress on your GPU. So, it employs its DLSSAI rendering technology to ensure Minecraft runs at minimum 60 frames per second, at a resolution of 1080x 1920. The game can run at 4K at 60FPS using more advanced GPU models (RTX3080 and 3090).
There are worlds to download that you can use with ray tracing from the Marketplace or create your own using NVIDIA's starter kit. NVIDIA and Minecraft are also offering two new worlds for free: Colosseum RTX has already been released, while Dungeon dash RTX will be available shortly.
Minecraft with ray tracing features is available to all Windows 10 players