Hands on with Minecraft RTX - the most astonishing ray tracing demo yet? Eurogamer.net If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy. Hands on with Minecraft RTX - the most astonishing ray tracing demo yet? DF delivers a guided tour of the stunning Gamescom demo. Feature by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry Published on 22 Aug 2019 50 comments We've been following the evolution of hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing for some time now here at Digital Foundry - and one of the most spectacular demos we've seen actually took the form of Sonic Ether's RT shader mod for Minecraft, which brute-forced full path-tracing into the Java version of the classic Mojang title. It's brilliant stuff, and although slow, it will work on any modern GPU. But as good as it is, we had to wonder - what kind of improvement would we see with full hardware acceleration? What if Mojang itself incorporated full path tracing into the engine itself? The developer duly delivered at Gamescom 2019 and my colleagues John Linneman and Alex Battaglia played the early code, handing in the extensive deep dive into the demo found on this page. Similar to our own work with the mod, the developers put together their own custom maps to showcase the effects of full path tracing within the Minecraft engine. In our video, you'll get to see both of these creations. One of them showcases how the new technology interacts with the existing, older-style textures - which are typically based on 64x64 textures - but the video kicks off with a look at path tracing combined with higher resolution block art, reaching a maximum of 1024x1024. Nvidia's Gamescom trailer reveal for the path traced Minecraft was impressive enough, but in this extended playthrough, DF's John Linneman and Alex Battaglia guide you through the entire content of the demo, showcasing various effects and explaining how they work. In all cases, light interacts accurately with the materials and conditions in place, to the point where the developers accidentally discovered that the classic camera obscura pinhole effect could be replicated in-game. But this is just one of many remarkable phenomena path tracing brings to the table - and in the embedded video below, you'll see John and Alex run the gamut of the demo, experimenting with its various effects, and even pushing the implementation beyond its current limits. And hitting those limits is easily possible right now, most because Mojang has only been working on Minecraft's official path tracing implementation since April (coincidentally (?) when Sonic Ether's Minecraft mod first appeared), so there's still a long way to go before the RTX support rolls out generally. However, as a taste of how transformative full path tracing is, this is the most impressive demo we've seen - it's a more total, more complete implementation in a game than anything else out there, even more so than the impressive Quake 2 RTX. All of which is to say that checking out the video above is highly recommended! The DF Gamescom team sat down to talk with the developers in more depth, and we'll be bringing you that interview soon, along the more coverage from the show. Will you support the Digital Foundry team? Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they're capable of. In order to show you what 4K gaming actually looks like we needed to build our own platform to supply high quality 4K video for offline viewing. So we did. Our videos are multi-gigabyte files and we've chosen a high quality provider to ensure fast downloads. However, that bandwidth isn't free and so we charge a small monthly subscription fee of £4.50. We think it's a small price to pay for unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of our content. Thank you. Support Digital Foundry Find out more about the benefits of our Patreon More Features Digital Foundry Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090: a new level in graphics performance The Digital Foundry video review - and how the new GPU champion delivers for 4K 120fps gaming. 14 Feature Evercore Heroes wants to wind people up the right way "There's less rage at them, because they didn't end your fun." Feature What games get wrong about horses And what they could do about it. 34 Feature Shout out to all the Overwatch supports - where would we be without you? Merci. 55 Latest Articles Digital Foundry Sennheiser's legendary HD 599 open-back headphones are just £70 at Amazon in the Prime Early Access Sale Comfortable with neutral sound and a wide sound stage. Preview Football Manager's new Console edition is the best you'll get without a PC Getting Touch-right. 1 Splatoon 3 Amiibos will be out next month Ink-coming! 3 Fans think Phil Spencer's shelf is teasing the Xbox Game Pass streaming box UPDATE: Xbox confirms old Keystone prototype. 61 Supporters Only Premium only Off Topic: Take a minute to appreciate Cookin' with Coolio's incredible scallops recipe. What a great book. Premium only Off Topic: Reading City of Glass in comic form "Where exactly am I going?" Premium only Off Topic: Il Buco is a transporting film about a really big hole Underlands. Off-Topic Netflix handled Sandman brilliantly It was Dreamy. 9 Buy things with globes on them And other lovely Eurogamer merch in our official store! Explore our store