Without ray tracing, game developers often painstakingly hand-craft the lighting for each scene, approximating what they think it would look like. But games like Minecraft present an additional challenge: each world is randomized and can be dug up and rebuilt in whatever way you want. For Minecraft, the kind of realistic lighting ray tracing offers can’t be faked in advance, because the developers don’t know what the player’s world will end up looking like.
With an infinite number of worlds, the game engine is on its own – but because NVIDIA’s RTX 30 Series GPUs are designed to calculate how the light and shadow should behave at all times, this is no longer a problem. Every wall you build or light source you place will respond to the real-life physics of light. With ray tracing enabled, Minecraft may still feature the classic blocky charm, but the lighting elevates the experience like never before.
In the absence of ray tracing Minecraft runs on pretty much anything, and we have to be clear that ray tracing is a hugely demanding feature that demands a compatible PC. Fortunately, the laptop I have been testing the latest RTX-ready games on – the MSI GS66 Stealth – is more than up to the challenge, thanks to its Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, 2K 240Hz screen and, most important of all, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU.
Read More About NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptops Here
Enabling ray tracing on a world that you terraform at will ups Minecraft’s meager system requirements considerably, and while the RTX version will run on anything from a GeForce RTX 2060 upwards, I was lucky to have serious hardware powering things.
My experience ran at a solid average of 70-90 fps, and much of this is due to a clever technology called DLSS – or Deep Learning Super Sampling – which uses AI rendering to give you the benefit of lower-resolution frame rates with the graphical quality of a high resolution output. By enabling DLSS I was able to advance from 30-60 fps to 70-90 fps without any noticeable drop in graphical quality – hardly surprising when some of the latest games actually end up looking more detailed with the tech switched on.
