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Despite Microsoft canceling the much-anticipated Super Duper Graphics pack for Minecraft, the sandbox game will still get a significant graphical upgrade thanks to a new rendering engine and ray tracing support on Windows 10. Mojang has teamed up with NVIDIA to enable ray tracing on GeForce RTX GPUs, and the result looks quite impressive.
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“With the capabilities of this tech, you’ll be able to experience your Minecraft worlds with realistic lighting, vibrant colors, , realistic water that reflects and refracts naturally, and emissive textures that light up,” Mojang explained. You can see how real-time ray tracing will look in Minecraft for Windows 10 in the video below.
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Ray tracing will come as an optional feature in an upcoming beta version of Minecraft for Windows 10, and Mojang expects to make it generally available next year. If NVIDIA has been pioneering ray-tracing in its high-end GPUs, Mojang also plans to make the feature available on other platforms that support DirectX raytracing.
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In addition to ray-tracing support on Windows 10, the Minecraft developer is also working on a new Render Dragon engine for the Bedrock versions of Minecraft, which will introduce bring graphical improvements such as edge highlighting and new lighting techniques. The company says in the announcement that it actually demoed this new rendering engine during the Minecraft Earth demo at Apple’s WWDC conference back in June.
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“Render Dragon supports a range of graphics features, depending on what your device is capable of. Not all devices will support ray tracing, but we will have some graphics enhancements on most devices,” Mojang explained today. The company plans to share more news about this new engine soon, adding that “you’ll see individual Minecraft Bedrock platforms update in the months ahead as we learn the capabilities of our lovely new game engine.”
\n\nFurther reading: Minecraft, Mojang, Nvidia, Video Games, Windows 10