After making fun and participating in the trade show, Nividia's RTX ray tracing coming my world Launched on PC later in a beta version later today-it looks great.
We had the opportunity to check the beta version released today, which is particularly impressive as a demonstration of the ray tracing technology that Nvidia has been promoting since the RTX series GeForce graphics card was released.
Minecraft has a lot of meaning as a ray tracing display stand and the world ’s best-selling game. It is also a seemingly simple game, which may have great complexity, and is very suitable for displaying new technologies, such as ray. track.
Nvidia's Minecraft implementation has a high-quality ray tracing feature that can begin to provide all content in ultra-real quality, which used to be the field of pre-rendered CG and gorgeous, non-playable GPU presentations. It is perfect for the game-you can imagine Buzz and Woody cut these ray tracing environments. Although this appearance is not ideal for every game, it is a very useful presentation and benchmark. The simplicity of Minecraft essentially makes it the perfect ray tracing demo.
For example, here are two screenshots of Minecraft with RTX-the first has ray tracing turned off and the second has ray turned on:
As you can see, big difference. This version basically brings a few different features to Minecraft, all of which use a dedicated ray tracing core in Nvidia's RTX hardware to work together to provide a completely different visual appearance.
The first is lighting with ray tracing, which we have discussed a lot before. Ray tracing basically follows the path of the light beam to track its movement, which can achieve more realistic lighting, reflections and shadows. In Minecraft with RTX, it becomes very deep: the light actually passes through the colored glass and changes the color as it passes through, making the stained glass window realistic. Lava now not only illuminates the entire room, but also bathes in deadly orange running water, which means that the cave has a new look and feel. At the same time, physics-based rendering gives the surface a realistic feel-therefore, polished marble floors will reflect light, while rough surfaces will not.
Given that Minecraft has a built-in and indivisible day and night cycle, in this version, one of the most impressive uses of ray tracing is the use of shadows. This is the best ray tracing. Many of these demonstrations are in front of you, but the shadows are a subtle change, and you do n’t start noticing until you see the sun shining through the trees or open door slits or impose shadows cast by large buildings. they. The builder ’s favorite technique behind the demo world is to create huge skylights that completely fill the entire room with light at certain times of the day.
So far, my favorite is to use a mirror. This is just a matter of how ray tracing technology works in a specific way. Nvidia is ready to demonstrate a room in which there is a fully functional mirror room where the ray tracing looks like a small box room-but when the ray tracing is turned on and a specific block becomes a mirror , This room seems to extend for miles. Take a look:
I'm sure you can agree that on paper, the difference between the two is very obvious and can be happily called banana. For many years, ray tracing has been the main content of movie visual effects, but through this mirror room, you can quickly imagine the unique meaning of video games. Imagine that when meeting a boss in a similar room, you have to determine which never-ending horizon is real, and this is just reflection. Imagine a pile of mirror showdowns, each twitching action may be a real threat, or just yourself. These exciting prospects are perfectly demonstrated by Minecraft and RTX.
So-how about performance? Well, Minecraft with RTX supports DLSS and DLSS2, and Beta's performance depends on this quietly revolutionary technology, which can keep the frame rate increasing even if the game forces your GPU to handle some serious numbers. Without DLSS, this exercise will be difficult to perform-but with it, it will work well.
You still need to access the GeForce RTX series graphics card to run this Beta properly, but I found that the GeForce RTX 2060 Super and the more powerful 2080 Ti enabled the DLSS solution works well, always exceeds 30fps, sometimes close 60fps. I have encountered some difficulties when using ray tracing intensive elements such as glass, iron bars and other translucent blocks for serious construction, but these hooks will stop at the beginning.
This is a very real beta version, not the "dress up" beta version in the promotional demo, it is a beta version-therefore, certain performance issues are definitely justified. To be honest, I think its operation in the relatively early stage is surprising-you can see the effect of switching the display and tracking light in real time in the video table below to discover the actual performance.
To be honest, all this is very impressive. Although it is indeed early, it adds Minecraft to the list of games with excellent ray tracing implementations, such as Control, Metro Exodus and Battlefield 5. When performing high-end functions in a simplified game, this release may be the same as the latest release of Quake 2's RTX compatible version.
However, the Minecraft distribution is particularly smart, because Nvidia is using the user creation aspects of the game to keep the benefits of ray tracing in the hands of creators. Hardware manufacturers have released a set of worlds to help inspire and demonstrate-these worlds provided by Minecraft's main manufacturers, Mojang developers and Nvidia technicians will prove what ray tracing technology can do. Some of these worlds are built as purely technical demonstrations, while others have created confusion and practical game challenges around the visual effects of ray tracing. These levels are a good showcase, and anyone with a bedrock version of Minecraft can own it for free.
It is worth noting that although this is a version of Minecraft jointly built by Nvidia and Microsoft, which aims to show the former RTX solution for this function, it will have a wider impact. Xbox Series X will support ray tracing as a major feature, and Minecraft is one of the few games that has been shown on Series X with ray tracing. In this sense, this demo is also very curious for non-PC players, because it allows you to learn more about the possibility of customization.
Whether you are upgrading a large PC graphics card in the market, using a new console, or neither, this demo is still fascinating. The well-structured display of ray tracing continues to give us a glimpse into the future. This kind of ray, shadow and reflection fidelity is standard in all games-Minecraft may be one of the most easily understood demos to date.
