Minecraft: RTX also arrives on the best-selling video game in the world

Minecraft, the best-selling video game in the world with over 176 million copies sold, will be incredibly more realistic thanks to support for real-time ray tracing on PC, NVIDIA and Microsoft.

A free game update will provide Minecraft players with vivid views of the worlds they have created themselves, with more realistic shadows, lighting, and vibrant colors.

“Minecraft will expose ray tracing to millions of gamers of all ages and backgrounds who may not play other hardcore video games”, said Matt Wuebbling, NVIDIA’s head of GeForce marketing. “The World’s Best Selling Video Game Adding Ray Tracing to PC illustrates the momentum ray tracing has created in the gaming ecosystem.”

The trailer

“Ray tracing is at the heart of what we think is the next step for Minecraft,” said Saxs Persson, creative director of the Minecraft franchise at Microsoft. “GeForce RTX gives a whole new aspect to the Minecraft world. In normal Minecraft, a gold block just appears yellow, but with ray tracing turned on, you can really see the specular highlight, you can see the reflection, you can even see a crowd reflected in it. “

Path tracing

Together, NVIDIA and Mojang are integrating a form of ray tracing known as path tracing for the Windows 10 version of the game. Path tracing simulates the way light is projected into a scene. It presents a unified model for lighting calculations for different types of effects that have always been implemented separately using rasterized or hybrid renderers.

Among these are:

• Direct illumination from the sun, the sky and various light sources, including emissive surfaces such as fluorescent stone and lava
• Realistic hard and soft shadows depending on the size, shape and distance from the light source
• Per-pixel emissive illumination
• Indirect diffuse illumination (diffuse global illumination)
• Indirect specular lighting (reflections)
• Transparent materials with reflection, refraction and dispersion (glass, water, ice)
• Atmospheric dispersion and density (volumetric fog, light beams, realistic sky)

Real-time ray tracing is changing the way games are created and greatly increases the image quality they can achieve. Ray tracing is built on a robust ecosystem that includes industry standard application programming interfaces, support in a wide range of public and private game engines, and games from major publishers for the most anticipated titles.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX ™ GPUs are the only GPUs that can let you play with real-time ray tracing.

Gamescom 2019

NVIDIA is kicking off Gamescom 2019 in an exclusive invitation-only event that includes some of the most anticipated titles in the world, premiered in ray-traced graphics. Participants can play Minecraft and capture their own ray-traced gameplay to share later.