After all, Minecraft receives an official video update … only on Nvidia RTX

On Monday, Mojang and Nvidia launched the Gamescom game conference this week with a substantial unveiling of the popular mega-popular game. Minecraft: Visual upgrade patch designed exclusively for owners of Nvidia RTX graphics cards for the Windows 10 version of the game. This comes just seven days after another similar fix, which would have been free for all Xbox and Windows drives, was canceled after two years late.

And although the canceled "Super Duper" patch seemed awesome, this one takes the intentionally chunky, lo-fi sound Minecraft on an entirely new level, thanks to a nice focus on ray tracing. Nvidia's range of RTX graphics cards each include a dedicated core designed to efficiently map huge amounts of light bounce in 3D images, as well as its effects on Minecraft could be their most impressive yet.

The trailer for the upgrade shows exactly what this "trail tracing" fix will look like and largely builds on more realistic patterns of reflection and light reflection. The pixilated "golden" blocks of the game now shine like gold. The reflective materials now reflect the crowds that walk near them. The light projected onto different types of materials will shine naturally, and the underground caves will now be consumed in an impressive red glow from nearby lava flows.

In addition to the ambient occlusion and shadow resolution upgrades, the trailer also shows a pretty dazzling redesign of the game's water rendering system. Although the game still creates big blocks of "bubbles" in the water, it reflects and otherwise refracts the visible light both above and below the water.

No release date beyond "2020" has been given and Mojang has not announced whether this exclusive RTX fix would cost more for current game owners.

An important question arises before live previews of the feature at this week's Gamescom: what will be the complexity of this fix? Even top-of-the-line GeForce RTX graphics cards, such as the RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2080 Ti, have trouble rendering RTX-only patches for some games effectively. Fans playing MinecraftThe Java version on PC may already know, thanks to a project that allows similar adjustments in terms of lighting and reflection (although this mod is in alpha and is not as pretty as the official RTX patch of today reveals it). We look forward to seeing the patch captured directly by Gamescom participants and to learn how much a big PC is being used in these demos.

We also wonder if the Super Duper graphics pack, intended to be launched on all Xbox and Windows versions of Minecraft, was canceled in favor of this. Although neither Mojang nor Nvidia mentioned the canceled pack, Monday's video contains a revealing quote: "It is permissible for the team here to focus solely on Minecraft the game and Nvidia to focus on the underlying technologies ".

Nvidia used Gamescom as an opportunity to reveal other RTX-exclusive patches for PC games next year, but these were not nearly as revealing. The most dramatic, for Call of Duty: Modern war, did not have a lot of testing on A / B tests, and the other new trailers were even rarer in terms of visual detail.

And what about those who own Minecraft on platforms other than the combination of Windows 10 and Nvidia RTX? They may also see visual improvements in the near future, although these may be more subtle. Mojang announced on Monday its own announcement regarding the upcoming move of the game to a new rendering pipeline in its "Bedrock" edition, the one that is the most widely expanded and updated. The new engine of the game is called "Dragon Render".

The blog article vaguely summarizes Render Dragon's updates: "Improved emissivity, directional lighting, outline highlighting, and new lighting techniques." Contrary to what the RTX patch revealed, Mojang was not ready to show the intensity of these Render Dragon updates, or to say whether or not they would come close to the superb Super Duper graphics pack of 2017.

"Not all devices will support ray tracing, but we will have graphics enhancements on most devices," says Mojang's official blog.

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