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Minecraft with RTX is breathtaking
Butcher79
Physically based rendering is the key to Minecraft with the RTX visual overhaul. The Minecraft with RTX beta starts today, April 16th, and the full RTX update should be installed later this year. It includes the most exciting and significant visual overhaul of the game since it was first launched in 2009 and features a complete set of ray tracing effects - including reflections, lighting, shadows and refraction - using a comprehensive path tracing tool.
From the looks of it, the ray tracer is similar to the one Nvidia Lightspeed Studios built for the Quake II RTX. It is built on top of Minecraft for the Bedrock platform on Windows 10 and again requires a migration from the outdated version of Java for Minecraft. Unlike other versions of RTX before it, Minecraft with RTX uses a path tracer that uses a computationally intensive ray tracing process to create a frame from scratch. If, say, Battlefield 5 or Control has a few favorite ray tracing effects, a path tracing game has access to all the effects that a physics-based realistic rendering process has to offer.
But in order to use the path tracer for realistic effects, you must first prepare your geometry. That's where physically based textures come in: a new collection of material properties for every Minecraft block. Whereas each game block that filled the map had two basic properties - color and opacity - the new rules for Minecraft with RTX introduce four more: metallic, normal (height map), emissive (light emitting properties), and roughness.
So if the RTX BlockWorks theme park isn't already awe-inspiring on its massive scale, those four extra dimensions for each block make it a logistical construction nightmare. But fear not, most of the work has been done for you before launching Minecraft with RTX. Nvidia and its creative team from razzleberries , many of who first introduced HD resource packs, two each, made some blocks to make RTX a little less difficult for beginners.
All of this highlights the effort that has been put into Minecraft with RTX for the better part of eight months, probably longer, to get it in shape for a public beta.
For a game that I at first thought was unworthy of a ray tracing conversion, Minecraft is a particularly inspiring example of the use of a new rendering technology. Its blocky graphics are enhanced tenfold by ray tracing without losing sight of the famous simplicity that made the game so great from the start. Physical level texture changes, such as brickwork, switches, or carved stone, add only minor blemishes to the surface of the block, but completely change the look of the game world.
But while the game sticks to its graphical roots, it has lost a lot of its accessibility along the way. “Full path tracing in Minecraft is graphically intensive,” an Nvidia spokesperson tells us.
Nvidia is touting three "key new technologies" introduced in Minecraft with RTX: Path Tracer, Physical Texture System, and DLSS 2.0. Each is as necessary as the last to make Minecraft with RTX a playable reality.
While games like Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood have greatly improved DLSS 2.0 performance, and the visuals have little to no effect, the feature remains a useful, but not essential, extra. However, things are different in Minecraft with RTX, while Nvidia's supersampled wyverkind is a must for 60fps+.
But first, let's deal with disclosure: our numbers not reflect the final performance of the game. Nvidia promises to keep learning and improving DLSS 2.0 from now until the official release, so we may find further improvements in speed or accuracy on launch day.
At least for now, with the RTX 2080 and Core i7 9700K connected to 1440p on my testbed and DLSS 2.0 enabled in "Balanced Mode", we're experiencing some creaking. Our average frame rate is typically over 60fps, but quickly drops to the low 40s when you're looking into an open perspective - which we're certainly not used to doing in such an amazing game.
| Avg (frame/s) | Min (frame/s - 99th percentile) | |
|---|---|---|
| 1440p | ||
| RTX enabled / DLSS 2.0 enabled | 67 | 51 |
| RTX enabled / DLSS 2.0 disabled | 30 | 22 |
| RTX disabled | 192 | 118 |
| 1080p | ||
| RTX enabled / DLSS 2.0 enabled | 83 | 67 |
| RTX enabled / DLSS 2.0 disabled | 50 | 38 |
| RTX disabled | 208 | 125 |
For reference: DLSS rendering resolution is set automatically depending on the output resolution: "Quality" at 1080; "Balanced" at 1440p and "Performance" at 4K.
Without DLSS 2.0, things get even more severe. While DLSS is essentially the same as inline rendering, if you intend to disable the setting (which is enabled by default), you can expect a performance hit of 55%. All this provides a full comparison with an average of 192 fps with ray tracing effects disabled.
Performance is slightly more rosy at 1080p, at 83fps with DLSS 2.0 enabled. But again, our RTX 2080 drops below 60fps with DLSS disabled. The game also appears to be running over 200fps performance buffers, hence the marginal performance increase between 1080p and 1440p with RTX and DLSS 2.0 disabled.
In internal testing by Nvidia, in the world of creators from PearlescentMoon, an RTX 2080 Ti with the best Intel Core i9 9900K processor - a terribly expensive gaming PC combo - manages 77 frames per second at 1440p с enabled DLSS 2.0. You should be grateful for that too. This same rig showed just 36 fps without the help of Nvidia's neural network.
Gaming laptops are also destined for thin performance choices. In testing, the Nvidia RTX 2080 Max-Q manages 57fps with DLSS 2.0 enabled and just 32fps without. Nvidia again promises further optimizations between now and the release of the update, and states that "laptop performance will vary from world to world depending on the complexity of the scene." The same applies to the desktop.
But perhaps the six worlds included in Minecraft with the RTX beta don't represent "real world performance." From the island imagination BlockWorks to Razzleberries Of Temples & Totems RTX or Water Adventures Dr_Bond - Every creator island is full of surfaces ripe for ray tracing. The same can be said about Crystal Palace RTX from GeminiTay or Color, Light and Shadow RTX by PearlescentMoon. Traveling in survival mode into the great unknown will surely bring on fewer screen castles built entirely from diamonds, glowing stones and shimmering stained glass. But perhaps the sandbox game is also missing the point.
Obviously, Minecraft with RTX is a double-edged sword. This is an amazing and inspired use of ray tracing and I admit I didn't expect to blow my socks off like I did before. Even I, who have lost my popularity in Minecraft, find myself strolling through these carefully crafted game worlds just to enjoy all they have to offer. Its beauty will surely inspire other users to film and share their creations.
But I'm running it on a $2080 RTX 700 graphics card, and no matter what Nvidia's sales figures hint at, many Minecraft fans won't be able to enjoy the game in what is by far its most beautiful form to date. Until the Xbox Series X surely spews Minecraft's fourth installment with the creation of Radeon Rays. It seems that despite the reasonable availability of a cheap DXR capable card in the near future (we're all committed to AMD getting the best performance per dollar), there's no limit to the game's steep system requirements for many of the existing >100 million active monthly players. .
We're not in the woods when it comes to RTX's disproportionately weighted performance impact, despite Nvidia's apparently impressive efforts with DLSS 2.0.
At the very least, RTX compatibility will not be required when logging into an RTX server at launch. Once the full update hits our machines, at which time multiplayer functionality is enabled, you will be able to enjoy servers built with physics-based textures without the need for high-frequency RTX silicon on your own machine. You'll have to agree with the Minecraft graphics we've otherwise been content with for the past 11 years, but at least there's something to be said for Island of Imagination how about the spectacle itself, without even a path tracer to enhance and polish it.
In a game known for its light system requirements, the clear winner of potato run, the inability to share your experience between friends leaves a sour taste. The sky should be the limit in the creative sandbox, not the number of GPU cores you have or the amount of money you're willing to spend. It's the same quandary that all growing technologies face as it approaches mainstream adoption: at one point or another, you're going to value someone somewhere outside the market. As inevitable as it may be, however, it bites worse than ever in a game of such monumental cultural impact as Minecraft.
But you must not let this completely detract from what has been achieved here. Ray tracing has been successfully shifted from a purely photorealistic activity to one of the most beloved and unique games in the world - and to stunning effect. There really is no better flagship for ray-traced rendering today than Minecraft with RTX.
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