2020-08-01_PC_Gamer_(US_Edition

(Jacob Rumans) #1
S

tep out onto the promenade of Imagination
Island, and you’ll catch a glimpse of an
expansive vista in the hazy glow of the
morning sunlight, filled with roller coasters,
food stands, and a cathedral that would give
the Sagrada Família a run for its money. It’s a Minecraft
world built by creator collective BlockWorks, and
every inch has been constructed to showcase the most
dramatic change to Minecraft’s graphics since it
launched a decade ago.


The Minecraft with RTX update flaunts its new suite of
ray-traced effects—including reflections, global
illumination, shadows, and refraction—powered by an
all-encompassing path tracer.
“After Quake II RTX, we knew it was possible,” says
Oli Wright, Nvidia GeForce devtech engineer. “So it seems
natural to go that way for Minecraft. It’s going to get the
best results. Doing individual effects will get you partway
there, but not the whole deal... it’s where all games are
going to end up at some point. Just a question of when.”
“We’ve had a history of making these kind of big
technological bets,” adds Kasia Swica, senior program
manager. “So whether it’s been early adoption of virtual
reality, cross-platform play between mobile, PC, and
console, especially from our engineering side, they’re


really looking for what’s next to bring the franchise
forward constantly. So ray tracing seemed like a good fit.”

LIGHT SHOW
Minecraft is a particularly rousing example of the new
rendering technology. Its blocky graphics are amplified
tenfold with ray tracing without losing sight of the
simplicity that made the game great. The inclusion of ray
tracing has even served to streamline the rendering
process and produce effects otherwise deemed impossible
or impractical, such as blending together beams of light
diffused through stained-glass blocks.
“This is something where ray tracing makes this kind
of effect much easier from a programming point of view
than a traditional renderer,” says Wright. “You’re shooting
a ray to the sun, and that’s going to be going through
different layers of glass. And that’s exactly what the ray
tracing shader infrastructure gives you. It can tell you
when that ray goes through every polygon along the path.
“So you can just say: Figure out what color it is, how
much of the light is going to get through that bit of glass,
and what color it’s going to change to. And you just do
that for every bit of glass that the ray goes through. And it,
I don’t want to say just works, but it just works. So that
those kind of effects are actually far easier to do with ray
tracing than they would be with a rasterized game.”

Crystal Palace RTX
by GeminiTay.

Bleeding
edge
Ray tracing is a
physics-based
rendering
technique first
proposed in
1968, but only
recently made
possible in
real-time within
videogames. By
tracing the path
of light between
a camera and a
light source, and
keeping track of
all the
intersections
along the way,
ray tracing allows
for the
composition and
lighting of a
scene with
lifelike accuracy.

REBUILDING BLOCKS


Cutting-edge graphics find an unlikely home in MINECRAFT WITH RTX


PCG INVESTIGATES


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