The big news out of Gamescom for Minecraft fans was the announcement that ray tracing will officially be supported for the game on PC.
It will be available for the Windows 10 version of the game and it uses a version of ray tracing called path tracing.
This news comes on the heels of the canceled high texture pack that was designed to give Minecraft better-looking graphics. It was announced during E3 2017 during Microsoft’s press conference but was delayed indefinitely before finally being canceled.
What is Needed for Minecraft Ray Tracing?
Nvidia’s RTX line of graphics cards will be what you need for ray tracing. This means you need any of the 20-series cards in order to get the most out of the new features.
Ray tracing has since been enabled for the 10-series cards but Nvidia didn’t make any mention of them with the Minecraft announcement.
We’ve reached out to Nvidia for clarification and will update this post once we hear more.
As for what it actually does, you can look forward to a variety of changes, including the following:
When does it come out?
While you might be excited about this news and ready to get your hands on a new GPU for Minecraft, however, there hasn’t been any official release date announced.
It doesn’t sound like we should expect ray tracing to hit Minecraft this year as it’s on track for release some time in the new year. Fans in attendance at Gamescom are able to capture footage themselves so it’s definitely pretty far along.
Since ray tracing requires relatively new hardware, it’s still in its infancy among gamers but as more games begin to adopt it, it’ll be harder and harder to resist.
For the time being, this update will remain exclusive to Windows 10, but perhaps ray tracing could make its way to consoles one way or another.