Tested: Minecraft showcases the beauty of ray tracing— and Nvidia's DLSS 2.0

Ray-traced Minecraft is a glorious feast for your eyes, and a grueling test for your graphics card.

- BRAD CHACOS

After an endless drip of teases, Minecraft for Windows 10 has rolled out a beta that adds support for real-time ray tracing and Nvidia’s faster, better Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 2.0 technology (go. pcworld.com/d1ss). Friends, the wait was worth it. Ray-traced Minecraft is glorious to behold, completely altering the look and feel of the game—though this low-fi legend can make even the most fearsome graphics cards sweat when you activate the cutting-edge lighting technology.

We’ve already discussed the technical details in our Minecraft beta announcement coverage (go.pcworld.com/btcv). Hit that up to learn what you’ll need to run this new-look Minecraft. (Spoiler: A GeForce RTX 20-series GPU is mandatory at the moment, as it’s the only gaming hardware with dedicated ray-tracing hardware built-in.) This article will only tackle visual comparisons and performance concerns.

Long story short: My god, it’s gorgeous. Most ray-traced games, such as Control and Metro: Exodus, embrace the technology in a hybrid manner. A couple of effects in those games use real-time rays for added fidelity—more lifelike shadows or reflections, for example—but the vast majority of the visuals are rendered using traditional rasterization techniques. (Our explainer to the DirectX Raytracing API (go.pcworld. com/dctr) goes into far more detail.) But Minecraft, like Quake II RTX before it (go.pcworld. com/qke2), opts for full-on path tracing instead. That means all lighting in the game happens with rays, delivering incredibly realistic shadows, lighting, reflections, and more.