Real-time beam tracking technology for Minecraft

Minecraft, NVIDIA and Microsoft have announced that the world’s best-selling video game with more than 176 million copies, with real-time ray tracking support, will be dramatically more realistic. The new free game update will bring Minecraft players more vivid visuals, more realistic shadows, lighting and vivid colors in the worlds they create.

Matt Wuebbling, NVIDIA GeForce Marketing Manager: “Minecraft will introduce millions of gamers of all ages with ray tracking technology, who don’t prefer more demanding video games. The fact that the world’s best-selling computer game adds ray tracing on the PC shows the momentum created by ray tracing in the game ecosystem. ”

Saxs Persson, Creative Director, Microsoft Minecraft, said, “Beam tracking technology is an improvement that we get for Minecraft when we think about what we can do next. GeForce RTX gives the world of Minecraft a whole new feel. In normal Minecraft, a gold block only looks yellow, but when ray tracing is on, you see the reflection highlight, you see the reflection, you can even see the reflected enemy. ”

NVIDIA and Mojang are adding a ray tracking method known as path tracking to the Windows 10 version of the game. Path tracking simulates the way light moves across a scene. It offers a unified model with lighting calculations for many different types of effects, traditionally pixelated or applied separately using hybrid renderers.

These include:

• Direct illumination from a variety of light sources including sun, sky, and absorbent surfaces such as luster and lava

• Realistic hard and soft shadows depending on the size, shape and distance of the light source

• Illumination per pixel

• Indirect diffuse lighting (diffuse global lighting)

• Indirect specular lighting (reflections)

• Transparent materials with reflection, refraction and scattering (stained glass, water, ice)

• Atmospheric scattering and density (volumetric fog, light shafts, realistic sky)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX series GPUs stand out as the only graphics card capable of playing games with real-time ray tracing.