PC World - USA (2020-06)

68 PCWorld JUNE 2020

REVIEWS TESTED: MINECRAFT

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.

Heck, you can

even see colors

reflected off other

solid surfaces, as shown below. Look at how

the pink and yellow hues from the colored

blocks reflect off the marble stairs.

The Minecraft beta adds “physically based

materials” that react to the realistic ray-cast

lighting. In the standard version of the game,

textures have only two material states: Color

and opacity. Ray traced worlds support

materials with not one, not two, but four

additional states: Metallic, normal, emissive,

and roughness.

RTX on.

RTX off.