Minecraft with RTX ray tracing launches for Windows 10

Minecraft’s blocky aesthetic was massively spruced up with the introduction of ray tracing enabled by Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards earlier this year. And now, that feature is coming out of beta, and path-traced ray tracing is available to all Windows 10 Minecraft players with the GPUs that support it, Nvidia announced in a blog post on Tuesday.

If you missed the beta or other examples in 2020, ray tracing allows for realistic, physics-based lighting in games. Minecraft traditionally shirks realism in favor of a pixel art, sandbox fantasy aesthetic, but the pairing works well here. The changes to lighting are most immediately notable in reflections in water, shadows that respond dynamically to light sources, and different intensities of...

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