REBUILDING BLOCKS
Cutting-edge graphics find an unlikely home in
Step out onto the promenade of Imagination Island, and you’ll catch a glimpse of an expansive vista in the hazy glow of the morning sunlight, filled with roller coasters, food stands, and a cathedral that would give the Sagrada Família a run for its money. It’s a Minecraft world built by creator collective BlockWorks, and every inch has been constructed to showcase the most dramatic change to Minecraft’s graphics since it launched a decade ago.
The Minecraft with RTX update flaunts its new suite of ray-traced effects—including reflections, global illumination, shadows, and refraction—powered by an all-encompassing path tracer.
“After Quake II RTX, we knew it was possible,” says
Oli Wright, Nvidia GeForce devtech engineer. “So it seems natural to go that way for Minecraft. It’s going to get the best results. Doing individual effects will get you partway there, but not the whole deal… it’s where all games are going to end up at some point. Just a question of when.”
“We’ve had a history of making these kind of big technological bets,” adds Kasia Swica, senior program manager. “So whether it’s been early adoption of virtual reality, cross-platform play between mobile, PC, and console, especially from our engineering side, they’re really looking for what’s next to bring the franchise forward constantly. So ray tracing seemed like a good fit.”
LIGHT SHOW
Minecraft is a particularly rousing example of the new rendering technology. Its blocky graphics are amplified tenfold with ray tracing without losing sight of the simplicity that made the game great. The inclusion of ray tracing has even served to streamline the rendering process and produce effects otherwise deemed impossible or impractical, such as blending together beams of light diffused through stained-glass blocks.
“This is something where ray tracing makes this kind of effect much easier from a programming point of view than a traditional renderer,” says Wright. “You’re shooting a ray to the sun, and that’s going to be going through different layers of glass. And that’s exactly what the ray tracing shader infrastructure gives you. It can tell you when that ray goes through every polygon along the path.
“So you can just say: Figure out what color it is, how much of the light is going to get through that bit of glass, and what color it’s going to change to. And you just do that for every bit of glass that the ray goes through. And it, I don’t want to say just works, but it just works. So that those kind of effects are actually far easier to do with ray tracing than they would be with a rasterized game.”
Crystal Palace RTX by GeminiTay.