Minecraft's Ray-tracing Beta Arrives on PC this Week

Ten years since its release and Minecraft remains one of the most loved games of the present - now, it's getting a revamp by ray tracing. This is the best in gaming graphics. It emulates the physical behavior and light to give games high-quality cinematic rendering.

NVIDIA first announced that it was working on realistic graphics for Minecraft last year - now they'll be rolling out to Windows players on April 16th. The beta version is currently in beta. It will include the familiar Minecraft single-player experience with shadows and reflections ray-traced by rays as well as lighting and custom, realistic materials. Additionally, you'll be able to explore six new RTX worlds created by community creators. These include Aquatic Adventure and Imagination Island, as well as Neon District. They are free for Minecraft Windows 10 gamers who are using the Minecraft Marketplace.

Additionally, the release that is focused on visuals includes physically-based rendering (PBR) which means that surfaces are set to look more realistic whether they're rough matte stone or glossy smooth ice, and to help with the grunt work needed to run all this in the background as well, there's NVIDIA's DLS 2.0. This new version of NVIDIA's AI upscaler makes use of RTX Tensor Cores to take images with lower resolutions and then increase it to the desired resolution, purportedly doing a much better job than the initial feature that was released with NVIDIA's RTX cards.

Of course, since it's still in beta, you can expect a few issues at this point. Certain features aren't available in the beta, for example multiplayer realms, third-party servers or cross-play. There are still a few design bugs and certain dimensions haven't been optimized for the ray tracing. Banners are still black and slime mobs don't have faces. These are things that will be addressed when they are. The release date hasn't yet been set. MINECRAFT JAVA Developers want to hear from the community regarding the beta version.