Nvidia has invested a ton into ray-tracing on its latest generation of GPUs. Although a number of major titles already support ray-tracing, one key title that’s been expected to get ray-tracing support for a pretty long time is…Minecraft.

Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, first announced support for ray-tracing back in August of 2019. It’s been nearly a year since the announcement, and Minecraft is finally getting ray-tracing support, at least for some users.

Nvidia announced today it is bringing ray-tracing support to Minecraft this week as part of a beta. The company will be launching Minecraft with RTX as part of a beta for Windows 10 devices on April 16th, which is just two days away.

The new update takes advantage of the power of Nvidia’s RTX GPUs, leveraging its ray-tracing technology to give Minecraft a whole new look. “Minecraft with RTX’s worlds are almost entirely path-traced, with lighting and effects featuring unprecedented levels of detail, for the very best image quality possible,” said Nvidia in a blog post.

Nvidia has a very in-depth explanation of how Minecraft makes use of ray-tracing for shadows, reflections, etc., and I would suggest reading it here if you are interested.

The company also partnered with top Minecraft creators to build new worlds that show off the new RTX capabilities within Minecraft. All of that will be available when Minecraft with RTX beta launches this Thursday.

Tagged with Minecraft, Minecraft with RTX, Nvidia