Just last week, Mojang announced that it was cancelling the Super Duper Graphics Pack for Minecraft, the game’s first in-house graphics overhaul set to rival some of the most impressive mods. While the graphics pack may no longer be coming, there is something else in the works, with Minecraft set to get ray-tracing support.

In an announcement made today, Mojang announced that one of the big improvements coming to Minecraft’s new engine, ‘Bedrock’, will be real-time ray-tracing, which is being worked on in partnership with NVIDIA. Nvidia’s own in-house studio has been working with a bunch of developers to get ray-tracing implemented in games, with the team putting work into Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Quake II, Wolfenstein Youngblood and now, Minecraft.

Ray-tracing will be supported on ‘Windows 10 devices that are capable of DirectX R’. So, it will run best on an RTX GPU thanks to the accelerated RT Cores found on the Turing graphics core. However, you will be able to turn it on using other DXR supported GPUs, which currently includes most GTX 10 and GTX 16 series GPUs.

A Path Tracing shader mod has been released by Minecraft modders on PC, which gives a similar effect. For RTX owners though, an official ray-tracing implementation will run better.

KitGuru Says: The post also says that the number of ‘DXR Capable’ devices is going to be expanding, so we can expect wider support over time, likely beyond Nvidia’s own hardware. We already know that AMD is also working on ray-tracing for future GPUs and both next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft aim to support it, so ray-tracing support in Minecraft should continue to grow.

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