When you think of Minecraft you may think of simple graphics and simple textures. But the recent beta launch of ray tracer support for NVIDIA's RTX graphics card transforms it into an entirely new game. Simply put the ray tracing feature allows more realistic lighting, reflections and shadows. It's like jumping from grainy VHS tapes to HD.

Although I'm forced to admit that I haven't had the time to spend much time playing Minecraft however, I am a fan of it as a creative tool for children. Partially I just did not have the patience to handle a huge unstructured game. And frankly I never liked the appearance of the game. Aesthetics are important if you're going to be spending hours in the virtual world (this is also why I never got into World of Warcraft). But ray tracing completely changes the Minecraft experience. All of a sudden , it's more immersive.

The difference is evident the first time you load one of the six environments in NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Worlds Pack. Each of the six environments was designed by master Minecraft builders. Aquatic Adventure's water reflections and transparency were amazing to me when I first picked playing. We've seen similar visual effects from big budget titles such as the Assassin's Creed series, however, they've always felt like an approximate representation of reality. Minecraft's water blocks that mirror although flat and immobile were a little closer to staring at an actual lake.

Then there are the rays of light that shower the game in the warm glow. It's almost like feeling the sun on your face. These are "god rays," the volumetric light scattering effects designed to evoke the way light is reflected by clouds. Although they can be overused for example, like the way J.J. Abrams flings lens flares at everything, it was awe-inspiring to witness god rays through Ray Tracing. It didn't matter if was in the water or just looking up at trees, the diffuse light looked so good I almost believed it was being rendered in real-time.
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It might appear like I'm exuberating about pretty graphics however, after spending hours playing this Minecraft beta I'm more enthusiastic than ever about how ray tracing technology will alter the way we experience games. Remedy's Control, for example utilized ray tracing in a mixed fashion where it worked in conjunction with traditional rendering techniques. Going full tilt in ray tracing is something we've only demoed so far with this Minecraft beta and NVIDIA's RTX enabled Quake 2 demo.

Ray tracing can be compared to HDR in that it allows you to add texture and depth to your image, regardless of whether it's rendered at 1080p or 4K. I've always found the move to 4K to be a bit reckless. That's lots of processing power that is being utilized to process more pixels, and it's not always possible to see a dramatic difference as compared to 1080p or 1,440p -- particularly from your couch. As TVs and monitors move towards higher refresh rates, I'd expect that many gamers will put more emphasis on framerates and noticeable visual upgrades such as HDR and ray tracing, which is above 4K rendering. (But of course, the goal is to meet all those benchmarks at some point.)

The main thing I learned from the Minecraft RTX beta is: Realistic lighting can go a long way. Everything is more real from where it should and when shadows respond in a realistic manner and reflections appear like you'd expect. It's the difference between feeling as though you're playing a video game and experiencing the sensation of being in a virtual world.

Ray tracing is still extremely power-hungry and not accessible to most gamers. On my test rig which is powered by a Core i7 8700K CPU and an RTX 2080 Ti, Minecraft slows down to 53 FPS in 1080p when ray tracing is turned on. The hit is even greater for the less expensive RTX 2060. It's reduced to around 30 FPS, according to NVIDIA benchmarks. This is the point where the company's DLSS technology comes into play. It makes use of AI-powered rendering to provide better quality results from lower resolution images. After I switched that on, Minecraft was able to run at 93FPS in 1080p. NVIDIA claims that it will give the struggling RTX 2060 GPU an extra 53FPS.

Performance is also lower on RTX laptops which aren't as powerful as their desktop counterparts. NVIDIA claims that its RTX 2080 Max-Q machine similar to Acer's Triton 500, will hit 57 FPS in Minecraft with ray tracing and DLSS enabled. As it's the top of the line mobile GPU it is likely to be considerably slower for RTX 2060 and 2070 models.

These limitations mean that I don't think many games will go all-in on Ray Tracing anytime in the near future. But not in the same way we've seen with Minecraft. I'd also bet that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, both of which will run AMD's upcoming Radeon hardware, will face similar difficulties managing ray tracing performance. It's great to see developers experimenting with this new technology. Forget the rush to 4K -- we'll judge future games based on how well they implement the ray tracer and graphic upgrades you'll notice.