Minecraft with Raytracing

This video is sponsored by Scan and Nvidia. I am using a Geforce RTX graphics card to power a beta version of Minecraft with RTX features. You can check out Scan’s range of Geforce RTX equipped PCs in this video’s description, built for titles like Minecraft, Control, Cyberpunk 2077 and more.

I can’t imagine a world without Minecraft. Bit like mirrors, television, tetris and toothpaste, the invention of Minecraft seems inevitable once civilisation develops to a certain stage. Being rather old, my time in Minecraft was mostly spent exploring the earlier versions,

Before many of the advanced features found in the game today. Not that it mattered. The game was still incredible. I’d have vivid dreams about it. Most were spent exploring, but I remember one set in a library that seemed to stretch out in all directions. When I woke

Up, I was genuinely sad, believing that the game would never reach that stage for real. Boy, was I wrong. The game is so complex these days that it feels more alien and mysterious than those dreams about it that I used to have. And the new RTX beta has extended it

Further still. I don’t think 2kliksphilip 10 years ago would believe the Minecraft we have today could ever be possible. But here we are. The Minecraft RTX beta is available for free for anybody with a Geforce RTX card and Minecraft for Windows 10. To showcase the RTX features, there are 6

Pre-made maps, made by some of Minecraft’s most talented community members. They are utterly incredible and the creativity on display here puts my dreams to shame. They are lit in real-time thanks to several of the RTX features- one being raytracing to give these

Worlds real-life lighting. And the other is DLSS 2.0 upscaling, which smooths the image and makes it run twice as fast. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it. Nvidia recommends that for the beta, you stick to running at 1080p resolution, as the showcase

Levels in particular can be quite complex. The footage you can see here is done at the recommended settings and you can see it still looks fantastic. But for the rest of this video, I’ve ramped it up to 1440p and have extended the draw distance. Just know that,

If you’d rather have more performance, then the default settings will yield higher and more consistent framerates than the experimental settings that I’ll using. I will be showing many ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparisons to demonstrate the effect that

Raytracing has. It’s all too easy to take it for granted, so to see how it looked before is needed occasionally to understand how much of a difference full path-tracing can make. In a way it’s sad that you can take it for granted so easily, but it’s testament to

How realistic and natural the effect is. It is, after all, how it would be lit in reality. When I say it lights these worlds as though it’s real life, I mean it. This isn’t using any short-cuts or tricks- it’s lighting these places using millions of rays per second

To produce a result similar to if these places were built in real life. You don’t have to understand it to appreciate it. With it enabled, everything will just look… right. So those clips were from Crystal Palace. Let’s move onto Imagination Island and take a ride while I babble more about stuff.

Wheee. I can’t think of a game that would benefit more from raytracing than Minecraft does. It seems like a lot of people think raytracing is better suited to realistic looking games, or those with lots of detail. But games are

Good at faking those kinds of things already. Minecraft, on the other hand, features massive, procedurally generated and continually changing worlds. Even the best of lighting tricks will falter from time to time when trying to light Minecraft’s environments. But raytracing enables accurate simulation of whatever you throw at it, from spectacular views across

Beautiful landscapes and cave networks, right down that dark corner of your mud hut on the first night. I’m in love with this red canyon. Some of it is lit up with direct sunlight, but the rest appears to glow from the light bouncing

Off the sunlit surfaces… as well as from the bright blue sky. It gives the whole place a welcoming glow. And at the base of it- where this train journey would have ended had I not messed it up just there- is a massive, dark tomb. Not so much sunlight reaches in

Here, but what little that does still lights parts up, highlighting the subtle reflections and shading on the rest of the surfaces. They were given extra information for the raytracing to work with, to ensure that these surfaces were lit convincingly. Back up to the top now for another, quite different ride.

This second ride we’ll do at night to showcase the glowing lava. Without raytracing, you’d have to simulate this with thousands of lights. Adding these would usually slow the game down. But it does the opposite with raytracing. It gives it MORE light to produce an image

From, and thus a clearer result. And it looks beautiful. Even if this park might struggle to pass today’s stringent health and safety regulations. This lava’s shine extends well beyond the pools it radiates from. It lights up nearby forests, and even passing clouds overhead. Which in turn, shine yet more light back down

Across the world again. Thank you mister ride person. Onto another showcase level. Neon District is an entire city full of incredible, glowing structures. Everything either shines or reflects. In terms of sheer amount of content, this one wins hands down. I made my way into a carpark and it was full of futuristic looking

Vehicles. I sandwiched myself between two giant glass panels and saw how different blocks filtered the light in different ways. I know already that I’ll never see all that this level has to offer. The guys at Nvidia have been adding raytracing to Minecraft for just

Over a year. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Elysium Fire team had been developing this level for longer than that. It’s the reflective surfaces which really stand out here. The metallic walkways accurately reflect whatever is around them. I entered this train carriage and you can see how the glass blocks subtly distort whatever’s

On the other side of them. I then destroyed all of the lights and it plunged the whole carriage, and its reflections, into a deep red light. The sun set and the city returned to neon once again. There was an underwater showcase to demonstrate the beams of light and refraction. It really

Gave the ocean a feeling of depth and mass. I didn’t spend a lot of time in this part. I feel water is something we’ve gotten good at faking already, so bar the pretty beams of light and bizarre refraction, it’s just… pretty looking water. I was more impressed

With the sheer scale of this structure and being able to see water from behind a glass surface like so. Inside this place was a 3-party puzzle, all set down tastefully reflective corridors. This room, housing a ship-wreck, was particularly

Impressive. As I completed parts of the puzzle, the RTX logo would light up. In normal games this would require some fancy trickery, but here it was just done by a few glowing blocks hidden behind the writing, and probably some redstone logic that I wouldn’t understand.

My favourite showcase was ‘of Temples and Totems’. You start in a rather unassuming jungle village, but venture out into the wilderness and you’ll eventually stumble across some amazing looking places. Let’s go on a journey. When I saw this one I knew I had found the centre-piece of the level. But it turns out

There are about 6 of these. Each lovingly decorated both inside and out, complete with their own themes, puzzles and traps. I spent some time taking timelapses of these places because with raytracing, the time of day really changes how these places feel to explore. Inside, light would zoom across the floor,

Lighting up the surroundings in whatever colour the sunlight hit. And outside, I loved watching the shadows of trees make way for the sun around late morning. This water temple contained some nice reflective surfaces… …but it was this lava temple that I liked the most, bathing the surrounding jungle in an eerie orange glow.

And I hate to play favourites, when all of the maps were so far beyond what I could construct, but this was definitely my favourite. A great combination of exploration, discovery, nature and spectacular buildings. It was sad to see these places with the raytracing turned off.

The insides fared better, but the outsides fell flat when compared against the cinematic appearance of the raytraced lighting. And there was also a showcase level full of dozens of different experiments. I had some fun with those, mixing colours, but it wasn’t

Long before I carved my way out of the level to do my own thing, checking out the ground-level fog, and digging dark tunnels then flooding them with light by making occasional holes. Raytracing is what makes the lighting and reflections look so good. But it’s the upscaling

That makes it playable. This little option in the menu activates DLSS 2.0. In short, it renders the game at a lower resolution, then uses AI to fill in the gaps. Compared with not having it enabled, it results in similar visual quality, excellent anti-aliasing

And about double the framerate. I have provided a few before-and-afters here. The image itself remains virtually identical. The differences boiled down to the shadows and reflections, which I felt were sometimes less defined when DLSS was enabled. Aside from this section,

DLSS is enabled for rest of this video because you can’t really argue with double the framerate, which pushed the game from about 40 FPS to 80 at 1440p, which is a lot smoother and more playable. These showcase maps are beautiful. But this is Minecraft! That’s not how the game works.

There’s literally no way you can see somebody else’s world without getting that urge to make your own. It is MINEcraft, after all. So of course, after seeing all these pretty showcases I created a world for me to build upon and to destroy as I saw fit. This is

My first structure built in raytraced minecraft, which I’ve imaginatively called ‘Nice House 1’. Come on an adventure around it with me! It gets the most light in the early morning, but because it’s built from white concrete, it doesn’t take much to light it up. Below it I’ve placed 2 large mirrors. These raytraced

Mirrors are the most reflective surfaces I’ve ever seen. It’s a little confusing, really. It looks exactly like the level itself and when you have 2 of them placed like this, the resulting images are confusing to say the least.

Moving up to the rest of the structure, I used different colours of stained glass, which produces different colours and shades of shadows. This is the ‘white’ glass, this is the ‘black’, which reflects the scenery a lot more… and around the sides, large sheets

Of brown stained glass. My favourite. Come, let’s visit the top floor of this structure! Inside this is yet more differently coloured stained glass, forming a rainbow on the wall behind. You have to catch it early in the

Morning to see this though- the rest of the time I rely on the glowing white blocks but they aren’t quite as bright. Over the other side are glowy blocks of different colours. Look at how their colours bleed across the surrounding surfaces. Beautiful.

Down into the main room, I mostly mess about with the same kinds of things. I used these lovely reflective trap doors as decoration around the outside, and I love how warm the world looks through my brown stained walls. And… that’s it for this house. I did plan

To do more but got a bit sidetracked by these experiments. It’s easy to get carried away. Don’t worry- you’ll be exactly the same. Around the back you can see a dark corner where all the monsters like to hang out. Down here I’ve made 2 mirrors face each other.

Get between these and you can see just how many times the lighting can bounce before the game cuts it off to stop your PC from melting. I believe it’s 8 bounces, though most surfaces won’t need anywhere near as many.

And for my last experiment on this map, I made 3 dark rooms, lit by a single glowing block. This really shows how far lighting can travel and how naturally raytracing can light the darker corners even when there isn’t a torch in sight.

This being beta, there are a few things they’re hoping to improve upon before official launch. It takes a while for the lighting to update in dark situations such as this one, which I believe they’ll reduce by prioritising new lighting information when the world is

Changed in this kind of way. I’ve noticed, for a video about Minecraft, there’s been a shortage of mines. So let’s go underground and try to find some and see how they look when raytraced. With RTX on, the caves aren’t just lit by lava and torches, but also by any of the blocks

You’re looking for. Might not be realistic, but from a design and gameplay perspective it makes a lot of sense. And it looks cool too. Occasionally, distant caves will look brightly lit, then as you approach them they’ll get darker again. This is because the world

Hasn’t fully loaded, so the raytracing is unable to accurately light those parts straight away. This is an issue they’re aware of and are hoping to improve upon for the official release. But even now, I greatly reduced how frequently this happened just by turning the

Draw distance up. The mines were a joy to explore. Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the game are these blue rays. I realised this was blue in colour because the light was passing through the water up above. Never before have I seen this in a game- especially not in real-time like this!

So again I went overboard and spammed a load of stained glass over the holes to cast pretty coloured beams everywhere. Like I said earlier, I can’t think of a better game to demonstrate raytracing on than Minecraft. The sheer variety of environments

And situations, paired with the sandbox nature of the gameplay, makes it a joy to explore and to experiment with. I’ve spent about a week messing about with it and even now I find situations where I can’t help but set up a timelapse, or want to smear my face

Into a reflective block. Some of that stained glass makes me want to lick it. I haven’t even played the game normally just yet. Every time I try, I think up a new situation involving water or mirrors that I want to test out, or get that craving to explore a mine or to

Blow something up spectacularly. But one of these days, I’m going to do it. I’m going to start a new world and build my first raytraced mud hut, then sit there, admiring my work, as the sun sets on that first day. It has been a collaboration between Nvidia,

Mojang and Microsoft to bring pathtracing to Minecraft for Windows 10. Provided you have the hardware to run it, you can get this beta for free, click the link in the description for download instructions.