“It’s automagical,” Swica jokes. Yet there’s plenty of
busy work that requires a human touch, too. That’s where
physically based textures come in: a new collection of
material properties for every Minecraft block. Whereas
each game block populating the map used to come with
two base properties—color and opacity—the new
Minecraft with RTX guidelines introduce four more:
Metallic, normal (height map), emissive (light emission
properties), and roughness.
Physically based texture changes—such as those to
brickwork, switches, or carved stone—add only minor
flourishes to the surface of the block, yet serve to overhaul
the look and feel of the
game world and allow
objects to interact with light
and surrounding geometry
in an entirely new and
exciting way.
The underlying system’s
newfound complexity
surfaces new challenges,
and the team has integrated Nvidia’s AI super-sampling
technology DLSS 2.0, among other optimizations, to help
ease the graphical burden of the RTX update.
“We’re constantly optimizing and trying to improve it,”
explains Clayton Vaught, technical director of the
Minecraft Bedrock team. “We constantly push forward
and get more performance out of it. So as new tools
become available to us, imagine DLSS 3.0 down the road,
we’ll definitely want to partner back up with Nvidia to
bring forward the new tools there and we’ll want to bring
forward whatever we can inside the game to make it more
performant and more accessible.”
“And on top of that, there is still some experimentation
in ray tracing algorithms themselves that can and should
be useful for Minecraft which just aren’t ready yet,” adds
Alexey Panteleev, principle devtech engineer at Nvidia.
By its very nature as a simplistic sandbox, Minecraft
allows for a user to test the boundaries of what’s possible.
The ability to adapt to user-generated content is what
makes Minecraft with RTX so different to develop from
other ray-traced titles before it. I ask the developers how
they can ensure the game doesn’t break when a player
loads as many lights as they desire into a scene.
“That’s the real trick, isn’t it?” Wright says. “That’s
definitely the challenge
with this kind of game. We
hope that they won’t break
it, but they should be able to
put down lots and lots of
lights. And if something
does degrade, we hope it
degrades gracefully.”
A survival mode
adventure will likely turn up fewer screen-consuming
disco-castles than the pre-made beta worlds, but for now
ray tracing remains taxing on system performance. What
you get in return is something quite glorious. Even I, a
lapsed Minecraft obsessive, find myself strolling around
these carefully crafted game worlds just for the simple
pleasure of taking in all that they have to offer.
Minecraft proves that ray tracing doesn’t have to be a
purely photorealistic endeavor. It’s been built into one of
the globe’s most loved games to staggering effect. There’s
truly no better flagship for ray-traced rendering today.
Jacob RidleyFAR LEFT: Aquatic
Adventure RTX by
Dr_Bond.LEFT: Of Temples &
Totems RTX: A Tale of
Elemental Artefacts
by Razzleberries.WHAT’S NEW The effects made possible with ray tracing
GLOBAL ILLUMINATION
With ray tracing, indirect lighting
bouncing around a scene can be
generated in real-time.SHADOWS
With information on how an object is
illuminated, soft and hard shadows can
be achieved with nuanced detail.REFRACTION
By casting a ray through an object, such
as a lens, it’s possible to accurately
portray how it would alter light.REFLECTIONS
By tracking the path of a ray to and from
an object, it’s possible to generate
dynamic reflections with accuracy.THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM’S
NEWFOUND COMPLEXITY
SURFACES NEW CHALLENGES