Minecraft Ray Tracing with Digital Foundry

Alex

Obviously a lot has been made of the announcement that the PS5 would have some sort of ray tracing support, although it’s not actually clear if it’ll be hardware based, but here’s a nice video using the Minecraft Ray Tracing mod to show what a game changer it is for creating natural looking lighting.

DrDamn

What’s great about that is that I’ve seen RT demos on stuff like BFV and it’s looked nice, but I haven’t been overly impressed with it. This is instantly obvious that the lighting is more natural and it looks great. Maybe it’s the Minecraft simplicity, or the fact that Minecraft just looks a fair bit bobbins to start with so anything added looks good. It’s the first time I’ve been impressed with what the tech can add though.

Alex

I agree with you, Minecraft’s crappy lighting overemphasises how effective it is. In real AAA games the effect is much more subtle. The video does give a good idea of how it works though.

DrDamn

Coming soon to XSX

Though that looks a long way from what they showed “Running on XBox Series X” over two years ago …

NB: The twitter demo is very poor because it doesn’t use a PBR tileset.

Brave

Hmm. That’s not really selling the tech very well. I’m quite surprised that they’re even showing that off.

DrDamn

Brave they aren’t exactly, it’s just Tom Warren spotted the toggle worked and tweeted about it. It’s a terrible area to try and demo it, without the PBR tileset, so it just seems like Ray tracing = shiny grass.

DrDamn

https://www.eurogamer.net/microsoft-has-an-xbox-series-xs-version-of-minecraft-in-the-works

Will it include Ray Tracing support? It’s crazy that no official support of Series X¦S has been done yet.

Will a PS5 version also be done?

Alex

Ah, sadly it looks like this isn’t happening.

https://www.eurogamer.net/microsoft-has-an-xbox-series-xs-version-of-minecraft-in-the-works

DrDamn

Alex Booo!