What is the best graphics card to play Minecraft with Ray Tracing?

Minecraft is one of the most popular games of the last decades, so much so that it has become a real social phenomenon with tens of millions of players. Moreover, it has crossed the barriers of fun and has become a platform in itself. On the other hand, ray tracing is the future of PC graphics. What is the best way to enjoy Minecraft with Ray Tracing?

Let’s be honest, Minecraft doesn’t stand out for its graphics. Indeed, these are not generated in the normal way, but using a technique that is now obsolete, but very well known in PC games in the early 90s: the ray tracing

. If that sounds odd to you, we’ll just say that it’s the same technique used in classic Doom and could be defined as an early form of ray tracing. Where a light source is not emitted on the object, but simply the object returns a color value.

How to run Minecraft with Ray Tracing with maximum FPS?

Under Ray Casting, color values for simulating highlights and shadows are achieved by slightly modifying the base colors. In any case, it is an excellent algorithm to make it evolve visually. That’s why as soon as the NVIDIA RTX hit the market, the clear goal was to create a version of Minecraft with Ray Tracing. Of course, this implies the use of a powerful graphics card. What is the best option we have to run Minecraft in such conditions?

Since 2020 we can enjoy Minecraft with Ray Tracing, especially in its version optimized for your NVIDIA RTX 20 and RTX 30 graphics cards. Therefore, the code of said version is optimized for said brand of graphics cards. Let’s not forget that the AMD RX 6000, although it also supports ray tracing, opts for a different way of working. This gives them a disadvantage compared to the version optimized for its direct rival.

On the other hand, we must take into account that Minecraft with Ray Tracing needs excessive power, which we could consider at least several orders of magnitude compared to doing it with the original game. Thus, the game will benefit from image scaling techniques such as NVIDIA DLSS

to achieve a much higher frame rate. So let’s not be fooled by the simplicity of the graphics, just like Quake 2 RTX, Minecraft with Ray Tracing is rendered entirely using ray tracing. It therefore does not use hybrid solutions as happens in other games.

If we want to run Minecraft with Ray Tracing at a 1440p resolution and 8-song quality we are going to need one NVIDIA RTX 3080 to exceed 60 FPS, but with active DLSS we can reach 143 FPS. In case we choose a RTX-3070 like our graphics card, so without the NVIDIA AI scaling algorithm, we go to 53 FPSbut with this one goes to the 111 frames per second. On the other hand, AMD cards give frame rates close to 30 FPS, so they are not the best graphics cards for this.