Nvidia has released a new sneak peek of the upcoming Minecraft DXR update, Minecraft with RTX, and promised once again that a ray tracing overhaul will be coming "soon". But first, three new worlds designed by top Minecraft creators - Razzleberries, BlockWorks, and GeminiTay - and on how to create your own textures for the in-game pastor racer and real-time ray tracing Please take a look at the two presentations.

Each custom game world focuses on a different feature of Minecraft with RTX (the upcoming DirectX Raytracing update for Minecraft). "Of Temples and Totems" by Razzleberries RTX" uses mountains of lava to highlight per-pixel emissivity, global illumination, and real-time shadows, while "Imagination Island RTX" by BlockWorks focuses on stunning divine rays. by GeminiTay Crystal Palace RTX brings it all together in a stunningly well-lit magnificent castle.

So while a release date for RTX-powered Minecraft seems relatively close, there is still no official announcement from Microsoft as to when that will be; Nvidia simply states that the game is "coming soon."

For now, we'll just have to look at two videos and two how-to guides. Originally intended as part of Nvidia's GTC conference, it has since moved to online only.

If you want to start creating your own textures for when release day arrives, the one titled "Creating Physically Based Materials for Minecraft With RTX"

You may want to take a look at this video.

In this video, Kelsey Blanton, associate producer at Nvidia, Paula Jukarainen, development technology engineer at Nvidia, and Joel Garvin, art lead at Microsoft, discuss the high-resolution ray They delve into the tools and pipeline knowledge required for tracing textures. However, be prepared to take copious notes, as the video playback time is over an hour. See also the How-To Guide.

There is also a handy guide for migrating Java Edition worlds to Minecraft: also, how to migrate Java Edition worlds to Windows 10 Edition, which is required for the Minecraft with RTX update.

The second video is a deep dive into the process of creating a real-time path tracer for Minecraft by Jakub Boksansky, a development technology engineer at Nvidia. While you don't necessarily need to understand what goes on behind the scenes of a path tracer in order to enjoy the shiny surfaces, Boksansky takes a deep dive into the techniques used to significantly revamp Minecraft's blocky aesthetic.

With the ray tracing update, Microsoft is targeting performance of 60 fps or better on the Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU. Admittedly, this is still an RTX 20 series graphics card, but if this goal is achieved (and it is only a goal), RTX-powered Minecraft will at least provide an enjoyable experience across the entire ray-tracing capable stack.

Perhaps later this year, a competitor will emerge in the market in the form of AMD's Navi 2X GPUs; with Minecraft RTX powered by the DXR API extension to DX12, Mojang has promised support across future DXR-enabled platforms We are. And then we have to consider the Xbox Series X with AMD...

As someone who tried the RTX update in 2019 in a fairly pristine state, it has been near impossible to go back to regular old Minecraft since then. However, with no official release date confirmed, we can only settle for the usual cuboid background and vague promises of availability in the near future. Hopefully by summer we will be able to enjoy Minecraft's advanced path tracers, including global illumination, reflections, shadows, etc.