Insane Minecraft Ray Tracing in Action!

Hello and welcome today on this very relaxed edition of digital foundry let’s play we’re playing a very special mod for Minecraft that adds some very special lighting to the game and to play it I’m joined by my friend and colleague John linman where you at John I am right

Here I’ve come down from space to join you on this trick through this wonderful world that you’ve crafted this fun house of ray tracing if you will but I think before we dive in you should probably explain exactly what the heck this is that we’re looking at yeah this is a mod

For Minecraft front written by the author sonic ether that adds path traced global illumination into the game and it’s using the old Java version of Minecraft and I think the 1.21 2 version of it with the Optifine shaders or Optifine optimizations basically to make it run a bit better and also allow for

Shader editing and my goodness it is quite fantastic looking indeed but the reason why we’re here to talk about is the whole kind of hub of about ray tracing with the PlayStation 5 reveal and this is a very interesting version of ray tracing indeed and we’re running

On two very different rigs to show it off John what are you running on there so as usual I have the venerable I 970 900 X paired with an RT X xx atti and 32 gigs of memory which is great for this version of Minecraft and you really need something very different yes

I’m running on something that is technically in most of our comparisons a little bit more powerful than an Xbox 1x the GTX 1070 as the GPU with a rise in 1700 X and 16 gigabytes of RAM at 300 megahertz but you may be looking at my screen and wondering gosh that looks a

Bit chunky even for Minecraft standards uh to get this running I’m putting the game at 720p and locking it to 30fps with adaptive sync basically this mod is very heavy and it’s even heavy on your rig isn’t it John yeah that’s right I’m running at 1080p with

Adaptive sync but I’m hitting 60fps but it is not a hundred percent locked with the settings that we’re using though it is possible to adjust something downward a little bit to improve it but you know I think Alex it’s enough talking out here I think what what

You’ve constructed here is a shrine to path tracing in a series of rooms each one more insane than the last to showcase exactly what the heck this does and why it’s so important for real-time graphics rendering so yes Alison I mean before before we go in though won’t you

Come over here for a second even though your shadow or your name is glitching out if you look over here you can actually see a shadow map casting on the wall there with your username just it’s a neat touch I absolutely adore that actually died Jetix stuff like this is

So cool but anyway let’s let’s go through the path of path tracing the first room is very interesting this reminds me of basically half-life 2 demos with that kind of specular Sheen bounce lighting going everywhere well this whole thing reminds me of the original source presentation yeah I know

Things we’re missing here is gabe newell talking about you know welcome to source 3 this time we have added path tracing oh I can GL right but this is an interesting setup here because there is no direct lighting here at all the the area underneath here which is lighting

Up the room that we’re in is only indirectly lid itself so we’re seeing balances of lighting here to even light this room up at all and there’s even shadows and John’s gonna play some blocks here blocking it all up and you’ll see the room go basically pitch-black exactly so and you know

Start to clear out the blocks you notice you actually sort of see the shadows generated in real time yeah all this is happening in real time you see the specularity of the pink block flooding off of here you know will clear this up but it gets more amazing here you know

If you start breaking through over here what the Sun in I’ll see that yeah sort of like the light just like pours into the room you could eat you can see the specularity on the back wall this is huge cone of light coming right in there can even set that

There and get a little bounce light you know it’s a the one thing that makes us kind of even work it’s very heavy obviously and it’s not using the arty core on your rig this is OpenGL obviously exactly char DirectX 10 or not DirectX 12 and or Vulcan so I can’t use

The RT core for you and there’s a very specific version of ray tracing actually well I’m gonna have to cheat to get back up so yeah I mean you know we’ll get into some of the details on how this works in just a second but this this showcases an interesting

Warda software driven method for achieving these effects yeah although as you can see the requirements are still extraordinarily high so 30fps 720p for me your rig is more powerful than the most powerful current generation console yeah X 1 X and yeah let’s go to the next

Room yeah oh I guess I shouldn’t go down that hole no that’s good Gary hallway so this room I wanted to show off basically three things there’s kind of the differentiation in the materials on the ground that have different levels of reflectivity so you can see more of the

Reflected light and different hues of it basically on the material itself and also this kind of sky lighting above which is affected both by this color of the sky which is blue and you know with a like bit of white from those clouds and also there’s a tiny bit of bounce

Lighting here from basically the dirt and the tree giving it a glean hue and it’s this very gloss material that’s not completely reflective and it honestly just looks like architectural rendering from here it looks this is fantastic looking yeah it does I love this serene garden yeah but you know the block light

Structure of Minecraft is actually key to its implementation here I think yeah it’s talking with sonic ether the Minecrafts ability to kind of or its limitation to have the entire world always be known as being made of blocks is what makes this so performant already as it is

Basically it has the conceit or assumption always that the blocks will just be either deleted or existing or that’s right not moving at all so what keeps this so performant is that the fact that the blocks themselves cannot necessarily move and those are the only thing taking into account for the GI

Both the shadows from the blocks and the blocks themselves so John interestingly in the corner here you can see how he has a reflection if he gets near the wall that isn’t from the ray tracing itself rather you can see that when he goes off screen it disappears you know exactly the screen

Space calculation done for dynamic objects and I think transparencies as well too so yeah it’s a hybrid solution for this then and naturally the the fixed block shape of minecraft worlds is perfect for a voxel Iced structure it’s perfect because it’s you know it just fits like

A glove and because these objects are non moving and it’s a binary on/off you know present or deleted in a situation exactly you know that makes the calculations easier which is very different from this sort of yeah the modern eat well not the modern but the other more robust solution used by games

Such as battlefield 5 and metro yeah those games can you know have you know contributions into the ray tracing from dynamic objects and skin dynamic objects as well but then they’re obviously very expensive in their own right too but let’s go into the next room to talk

About some more stuff as well yes this this room is exciting I actually yes this one is like my favorite this looks so cool basically what I want to show up here was kind of the effect of the lighting hitting different colors and bouncing them off directly into the room

And depending upon the material you can see more of that diffuse and specular reflection itself and this this is you know this is actually something we probably mentioned often in the videos and it’s just a natural idea of yeah you know light particles photons sort of bouncing off a material and scattering

The light against other materials nearby I mean this is how light in the real world in many games have ways of sort of faking this effect yeah it currently and it does exist but this is generated entirely in real time and you can see that kind of when I move in

Front of it the shadow is obscuring the light causing the reflection to also be obscured as well too it’s actually I mean SH and if go ahead oh yeah sorry and the interesting thing about this is we’ve seen kind of voxel-based tracing demos and past that use cones

But this one is actually tracing with rays through this kind of blocky structure and it’s a bit noisy mainly because I’m running at 720p and there’s not that many rays and right there’s also the problem that these are very low resolution textures I mean it is Minecraft people so they kind of block

Out a bit more making them look a bit weird but still I think the the overall effect is phenomenal and you know you see the light comes in through through here the Sun enters through it bounces out there you turn around you actually see the specular image of the blocks

Behind us and and this is a perfect example because and it’s something you’re right we don’t really see this in typical games these days where we have these bright primary colors now and it’s so RGB of course and it’s just you know it’s perfect for demonstrating the

Benefits of proper bounce light it’s why when you see the more simulated faked methods in in actual shipping games it tends to be most visible on things like a marketplace with bright red umbrellas and the sunlight sort of bouncing off of that but you know again if a that’s a

Little bird there but if we start placing blocks it gets a little interesting as well because this you actually see the sort of the colors become almost additive yeah the light bounces off the red then bounces off the pink and it sort of it becomes a

Purplish a deeper hue and if I place like let’s play some blue blocks in here as well you start to mix colors and you can see them mixing over here so weird looking very 80s kind of color schemes going on the backside of this has turned green almost

The way this works is kind of interesting there’s only in real time it’s doing one bounce for both the the fuse global illumination and the specular reflection so that’s the only mainly real time component then after that’s done it accumulates by a by a technique called surface caching I

Believe multiple bounces so if I were to remove one of these walls right here you can see that there’s a bit of ghosting that’s because it’s cleaned up in overtime with temporal a-a-and because it takes about four frames for the lighting to completely generate perfectly almost so the room will get

Lighter over time them over more frames over about four frames about I’m sorry to destroy your masterpiece it’s okay I mean sort of demonstrates when we let the full light in here in the way that changes it really does feel somehow very natural like your eyes just adjust to

This and even though this is a completely fake world well in the sense that it’s it’s extremely abstract yeah and what I find so interesting about ray tracing and path tracing potential is what it can add to symbolistic visuals that’s why quake 2 is so fascinating and

Why I think this works so well I mean you can take an old game like doom like quake any of those and by changing the lighting model it completely rejuvenates the game completely and it you don’t need anything complex to make it look great if there’s this also this uncanny

Feel here it’s like you’re playing with LEGOs almost and when I was constructing this structure trying to make sure these rooms you know showed off effects that I wanted to show off I had to think about it in like extremely practical real terms about how I always blocking off

Light and blocking it out or making sure that certain reflective objects are in a certain pattern it was all natural I imagine is a lighting artist my goodness that looks so good as a lighting artist this was become so much a more natural process than waiting for it to bake out

And seeing if it looks right or it would just be a lot more fun yeah gosh I had so much fun building this but I think oh my goodness but while does that look really good I think going over just look at this bounce shadow over here this is like two

Levels of bounce to get that that’s insane to achieve this redstone you know is it it’s a very key ingredient to the world with Mike I know it’s like they look partially permeable they may see looking but so let’s go over the next room this room I want to show off another

Property of the global illumination itself – which was I blocked off the lighting and had it hit spits I’ll talk about those too soon those are cool but basically I wanted to block off the lighting so that it was only hitting a very specific material and we could see

The way it affects different materials these are progressively darker and less specular materials so this one’s like white and highly specular and so you can see if you look at the ceiling actually and all around it you know you get that specular reflection yeah and then the

Light bouncing off that material and the gray one has less specular reflection in the bounce light and the black basically here almost not at all exactly and of course this kind of highlights the limitation method here just you know it’s very noisy yeah but it’s still effective and the thing is like in

General very you know kind of rough materials that are still a bit specular are really hard to get because the rays are super divergent and your performance basically quakes when you try and do it right but my goodness these are interesting because the direct lighting for this version of the game that sonic

Ether made is actually using rasterization for the sunlight so that is all rasterized specular right here on the block itself but the candles are done fully through the path tracing so this lighting right here it’s all paths trace no rasterization at all which oh my goodness the

You can see the screen space element there with the lighting oh yeah yeah yeah I’m this specular but it breaks down a bit with the screen space effect which you can turn off separately in the options but it’s really cool I’m still looking back at this at this room with

The redstone just look at this this is this is bananas I love this IDE it’s like kind of Mirror’s Edge looking exactly exactly what I was thinking but this is just and look look what it does to the blue by the way check out the blue area it’s the color blue on your

Yeah this is a weirdly modifies this is yeah like this was green originally this was blue and when the lighting in the room has been bounced around in this rattle it changes the actual surface color that is something that is impossible to do otherwise you know I I

This open the opportunity I hope with this little bit of Sun peeking through here you can actually see it sort of restores a bit of the green color I know right there it is yeah like yeah remove that one look at that look so the top right corner here is like a different

Tinge of green than the bottom left is because of the bounce lighting this is this is a consistent material and it simply changes through the lighting properties there that’s it’s amazing to behold yeah so let’s go above really quickly and just turn back around and then I’ll show

Off some other stuff that we got going on here I kind of made this hallway just because I thought it looked hella cool to be completely honest absolutely the light bouncing off this yeah I think we could use some candles here just to spice up the room a little bit

Gosh and just I just love the way this this specular from the wall you can see it on the adjacent wall and right you can see Rachel horrendous and actually if you walk walk in front of this that’s going from this yellow right here I’m

Gonna look at the yellow and you pass in front of it with your avatar okay yeah you should be able to see John’s shadow crossing in front of the yellow every single time he crosses in front of it because his shadow has taken a part of the GI contribution actually his

Character model isn’t but his shadow is exactly so there’s a subtle change there yeah it’s awesome looking but boy my performance is yes it’s okay it’s like hanging right around 58 259 FPS on an RT x 2080 TI and it’s a 1200 US dollar GPU or something like that right so very yes

Exactly 1080p people let’s do this let’s go back inside woohoo come on John I believe in you I mean so hey just down the mystery whole mystery hallway this is uh taking some this is what I like to call the this is the Assassin’s Creed it is right when

You first saw unlike AC unity when they did their interiors of course that was entirely baked bulleted that’s exactly what I was inspired by here by doing that just kind of trying to show that you can obscure the light and get all these indirect shadows everywhere but

This hallway is where I want to play with certain emissive properties that the GI enables like here in this little room here you can see how the candle is partially blocked yet you can see it’s light bouncing all around the room itself even in the area behind where

There’s no light coming in directly from it it’s still lit as John walks past you should see the screen space contribution of his GI kind of going in and out too which is so cool-looking ya see what I place a candle back there or a torch on

The wall it looks like Lego it’s amazing it really is something special and I have a see if I if I place a little block right there kind of block in that be careful there is water above us we could flood the cavern by the way so we have to go careful

It want to do that but yeah let’s go a bit further ahead I created another to demo rooms down here ok so it’s good the first one been to the to the chasm is here if you can follow me ja yeah and now we were talking about

Quake 2 I couldn’t help but make something that looked like it would be straight out of the quake universe this is so cool because the lava or I forget the Redstone or whatever it is beneath us is an emissive texture and the entire block is counted as an area light and

You can have an entire block of lava beneath you evenly lighting the entire space that’s basically impossible with real-time lighting and games awaits them now and rasterization because that’s really it’s usually done through a point light or some sort of like arbitrary surface that will not actually have the volume and it

Does all these cool things like create a grid pattern of shadows which will probably be lost on YouTube honestly here but it that’s true this is very dark this is very dark red content so it’s not gonna look vit really that great on YouTube but make a nice red

Stone wall over there and like look you can that beautiful Specter yeah you can see that it stays in even if it’s off-screen John’s specular reflection there too it’s a bit noisy obviously given my completely low resolution here but if you can imagine jobs GPU using

The arty core to push this to the next level that’d be really amazing to it also kind of how you can create these natural shadows here as well yeah right placing that wall there everything just feels correct and that’s that’s the point of all this is to create very

Natural lighting yeah and it’s very dark over there now so let me play some torches for you line the wall they’re just there we go it’s all lit up nicely there do I have a shadow emanating from me from your perspective yes yes it should be in

Screen space but it should still look pretty sweet it is but yeah it’s there so for those of you still with us yeah hopefully you’re enjoying this tour through the land of path trees that’s a it is a fun ride I think and if I have

One last demo room very far below here there’s a zombie dog let’s head on down yeah whoo wait didn’t actually fall it’s okay now I’m descending slowly this room I wanted to show off color matching that it’s an entirely room zombie hear I hear zombie noises oh my god this this is two

Different types of emissive blocks one is blue and one is red but when they bounce they’re light the four times around the room the whole room takes on a purple hue actually that’s righteous mind-bending but if you look at the specular reflections themselves for the blocks well they’re red and blue and

This is something that you can’t get in any game at all and you can even block it off too well by doing this we sort of blended the colors together that’s another thing you can see that there’s a slight temporal component so when you Blake break blocks sometimes

That you can see through them it’s a bit weird exactly hey it looks really cool but basically sonic ether when we were talking to him about this see he was describing how he could get the game much more performant if if it was one probably using a more modern renderer

Other than GL and if the the shader pack allowed for some more I guess it would say custom you know custom programming it’s done in a very kind of blind way there’s not much yeah exactly that he can do about it to make it run and run

Better but if this were running probably on like dx11 or Falken it would be oh my god are we gonna go outside here John I’m working on it Oh God so dark where are we going oh I hear the sound oh wow gloriously made our way out shall we fly

Around the world and yeah take a look you can do yeah I mean this is there’s a lot of cool like natural things that happen there’s if we find a cave that’d be something really cool how about you let’s go over here and check out all this water actually where’d you go there

Yeah because we have a really showcased the water oh yeah that’s so we’ve been always kind of looking at kind of glossy reflections but the reflections can be extremely sharp if you look over here you can see everything reflected that’s right and actually if I go on to the other side

You should be able to see John reflected in the water too and I see you reflected right there next to that moving lava bit and yeah it’s just it’s partit Sapir fect mirror like reflection if you look along the edge of the screen you don’t get any of the typical SSR artifacts

From those reflections but you do get it from the the dynamic objects as you said yeah yeah so still it’s an old dynamic objects seem to use screen space well the static world one of these mostly studies cows do it I mean so there’s a cave over here as well is

There do you remember doom this looks like diminished lighting in do it absolutely does this was best on the guitar EJ were yeah thanks to the c ry color this looks yeah you can see the individual bounce light from here going like this and

And modify it a bit oh my god still a block bye bye John hey and are you placing some lighting in there yes it’s it’s well in here and if I do this you should see it pouring out my goodness I think look at this gelatin I can still

See your name through them that’s really weird but yeah basically everything real time everything looking very interesting and running out how’s it going there I’ve I’m kind of lost in your Bay’s of I’m behind you what see the magic of Minecraft I am now a magician I love

That you can see the noise here on this yellow block yeah it does make you kind of wonder what further variations would be like this in the future how much more performance sonic ether can extract from it getting it to run better because obviously some 22 P 30 on

A nice GPU like this is a bit sad but I hope it gets updates in the future of my goodness look at this reflections here yeah we’re looking at a very standard map really this is the generator yeah with some changes we made it if you actually load up on some other servers

Where they’ve done a lot of work to build out these beautiful cities it benefits a lot from running with with retracing and abled and I just love the the Sun glare in a distance looking at these reflections it really is just a beautiful beautiful thing it completely changes the look

Yeah I mean minecraft is known for its low res blocky graphics but I’ll sudden it’s like real-life minecraft but yes it’s just it’s just too much fun to play around with is there anything else we should do before we close out this session I guess maybe we could try to

Build some more randoms try and build I mean what’s the typical minecraft structure before you start it up as always a house to keep yourself alive in the night I guess what I could do that way why don’t you come up and join me in the digital foundry skytower

Constructing whoo oh my god my GPUs about to keel over 80% I’m also at 80% and all these are emanating with red lighting yes of course that’s super silly it’s akin to RGB oh my goodness so but yeah as you can get the point basically build building this special

Digital foundry tower the one ray tracing enable the is much more fun than it was an apex Legends that’s right it does speak we wonder actually if we could see something like this on next gen consoles what do you think there John like something like this I mean it’s

Running this is still running in real time on my rig and I think it’s almost worth it for a game like Minecraft it doesn’t need super resolution I agree I absolutely think that I think that this is a perfect example of the type of ray

Tracing we or path tracing we may see on next-generation consoles may be simpler games but also you know with a lower performance target if you’re happy to target 30 frames per second and you take make some smart decisions yeah fake a few things you know you can do some some

Amazing work that’s kind of the way I say right now – I mean obviously minecraft is not the same as Metro Exodus in terms of world complexity but darn if it does not look that much better as a result of being Patrick this is right now I agree and we have all

These look at I just love all these nice natural shadows with a good corner darkening like whoa what oh yeah it’s floating oh these are half blocks oh yeah I understand exactly so I could build some windows not the Microsoft right well I mean this was the Microsoft

Program oh yeah and they still sell the java version which was completely foreign to me but here we go Wow you can see it’s like progressively darkening the shadow here as you build out more of these hands that’s amazing yeah but yeah basically minecraft path traced running in real time on the GPU

Amazing-looking shows off a lot of really cool effects and it’s probably only gonna get better in time and I hope that you can try this out for yourself this version of Minecraft is still available to be purchased and yeah I say give it a try it’s gonna absolutely I

Think I may actually end up using this in further videos to explain lighting techniques it’s that good this is a it makes for a great demonstration but yeah so if you are still watching this for some reason and I’m not sure why I hope you did enjoy our video talking about

How patch racing works in Minecraft here through this mod from Sonic ether and maybe learned a thing or two along the way and if you did enjoy it hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you’re already subscriber well hit that little bell in the corner to be

Informed if you really want her to be informed as soon as digital cloud repos to video we always like that and yeah write a comment below about what you think about Jon’s building skills here I mean just look at this tower there okay if you guys wait the the finale is

Coming yeah yeah oh yeah And this is John and Alex signing off