NVIDIA and Microsoft announced today at Gamescom that Minecraft is set to get a free update that will make the best-selling video game more realistic than ever with support for real-time ray tracing on the PC platform. This means that players with NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards will be able to experience even more vibrant visualizations of their self-created worlds, complete with realistic shadows, lighting and colors.
The Windows 10 version of Minecraft is going to add a form of ray tracing known as path tracing, which simulates the way light is dispersed throughout a scene, while presenting a unified model for various effects lighting calculations that are normally separately processed using rasterized or hybrid renderers.
This means that players will experience improved direct lighting from the sun / sky, realistic hard / soft shadows, transparent materials with reflection, refraction / scattering, and even atmospheric scattering / density. No exact release time was provided, but it’s been confirmed as a free update for all PC Minecraft players.
