News Minecraft With RTX Up: Nvidia Shows off Ray-Traced Worlds

WildCard999

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Ok, yes, sure, it's kind of pretty, kind of neat looking in concept.

But, as someone who has thus far never played Minecraft, is this something people actually want in Minecraft?
I don't play Minecraft either but I'm sure if it was a game you play a lot then features like this would probably be a nice add-on. If RT was added to COH: Homecoming (like 75% of my gaming) I'd be pretty stoked about having it.

I can imagine once it's fully developed in the game that we'll see a bit of forum questions like "What do I need to upgrade for RT in Minecraft?".
 

King_V

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Maybe... I just kind of figure that a game that's well known for doing a low-res "style" (rather than actually being low resolution) might not have as much of an appeal for ray tracing as say, a typical first person game.
 

WildCard999

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While I agree it does seem odd to add this to lower res "style" game I think the reasoning behind this is the "worlds best selling game". I'm sure if it wasn't Nvidia wouldn't waste there time with this and from a marketing perspective it will force those who want to use RT to upgrade.
 
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salgado18

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There are many retextures and custom shaders and effects already to Minecraft, to the point that it only looks low-res because of the blocks. So there is some appeal there.

However, I don't see anyone buying an RTX just to play Minecraft with raytracing.
 
It sounds like Nvidia is contributing to this "Minecraft with RTX" but Microsoft has already shown off an early version of their own implementation of raytraced Minecraft running on the Xbox Series X on AMD's RDNA2 hardware through DXR. I'm guessing this will be something available for the next Radeon cards as well, and I'm curious if Microsoft will be using "DXR" terminology to refer to it, seeing as they are now the developers of Minecraft.

Maybe... I just kind of figure that a game that's well known for doing a low-res "style" (rather than actually being low resolution) might not have as much of an appeal for ray tracing as say, a typical first person game.
One advantage to doing this for a game with relatively simple graphics is that the current RTX hardware doesn't really offer enough performance to do full pathtracing particularly well in graphically demanding titles. Any big games with RTX have had to pick and choose between a subset of raytraced effects applied over raster graphics. I would imagine that they might be able to simplify a lot of the raytracing calculations as well, due to most of the environment being cubes arranged in a grid. That could open up additional room for optimizations to get that "60 fps" on an RTX 2060.

As for whether people would want raytracing, it looks good, so why not? People don't play Minecraft because of the simple graphics, that's just something they are willing to put up with. If someone has the hardware to run the game with fancier lighting effects, then they might as well make use of it. It's not like running Minecraft at hundreds of FPS actually provides much of an advantage.
 
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alextheblue

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My main issue with this is that (for survival mode) it can artificially increase the apparent light level which makes it harder to determine (at a glance) if an area is sufficiently well-lit to prevent spawning. Some areas lit up by the lava with RT on make this pretty apparent. So I hope it's adjustable or can be rapidly toggled.
 
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** It seems to be a not taxing game at all ** - and as a side note, minecraft players don't seem to be the demographic that plunks down cash for new videocards much either, also IMHO most of the minecraft players are on underpowered PC's and consoles so whose going to spend $$ for a new video card when they'd be better off replacing their pc overall.

I admit it's nice to see, but since like .01% of minecraft players upgrade their video card just for this game - this is poor value for such an investment

It's a gee look what my PC can do thingy (followed quickly by a then, OK so what moment?)

(the above comments are based on my own narrow world view and are may be wildly inaccurate, in error or completely off base - in short it's my opinion, i apologize if i've offended anyone but feel free to disagree!)
 
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bit_user

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I admit it's nice to see, but since like .01% of minecraft players upgrade their video card just for this game - this is poor value for such an investment
My hunch is that it's more a case of just trying to increase the catalog of ray-traced games, which is currently pathetically small.

The benefit would be to help existing RTX owners feel better about their purchase and maybe to sway a few who are in the midst of deciding which GPU to buy. I doubt they're expecting many people to suddenly decide to upgrade their GPU for the singular purpose of playing ray-traced Minecraft.