Seeing the blocky looks of Minecraft with realistic textures and ray-tracing is both weird and makes the best case of showing off the new tech, as introduced in Nvidia’s RTX graphics card line. Minecraft with RTX is still not out yet, but Nvidia is teasing a bit more of this impressive tech showcase.
For those not in the know, Nvidia is adding RTX support to the Bedrock (Windows 10, not Java) version of Minecraft. What this entails is the addition of ray-tracing, which helps make reflections, shadows, caustics, global illumination, and other lighting effects look realistic. It also comes with physically based textures. As such, it replaces the blocky aesthetic of Minecraft into a still-blocky world but with realistic lighting and textures.
Nvidia teamed up with Minecraft content creators Razzleberries, BlockWorks, and GeminiTay to make creations that demonstrate the snazzy RTX effects. And quite snazzy they are indeed.
Nvidia has also outlined some guides on how to add your own texture that emits light or have normal maps- something that isn’t available in the Minecraft base game. Not only that, but they also shared best practices on how to convert a world from Minecraft Java to Minecraft Bedrock in preparation for Minecraft RTX. You can read them here.
There is still no release date for Minecraft with RTX, though it’s coming soon.