Minecraft is fascinating in its original voxel form, but it really transforms when ray-traced lighting is projected onto the entire block. Sean, who played Minecraft with ray-tracing last August, wrote, "I wish I could live in it." The version he played was a demo created by Nvidia to introduce RTX graphics cards and their ray tracing support. It also came with a custom texture pack to make the ray tracing shine. Since then we have not heard much about this demo. This week, Microsoft showed off Minecraft with ray tracing running on the upcoming Xbox Series X, a new implementation made to run without Nvidia's RTX technology. However, this is a new implementation made to run without Nvidia's RTX technology

; both Microsoft's new implementation and Nvidia's RTX demo are based on DXR, or DirectX Ray Tracing, an extension of DX12. Of course, Microsoft will use DirectX for their games and their new console. However, since the Xbox Series X runs on the new AMD chips, it cannot use Nvidia's RTX-specific implementation.

Looking back at Mojang's statements from last year, it becomes a little clearer. The plan was always to incorporate ray tracing into a new "Bedrock" (the latest, multiplatform, non-Java version of Minecraft) engine named Render Dragon. Mojang said, "We couldn't be more excited to take advantage of Nvidia's new ray tracing technology. 'It will be playable on Windows 10 with DirectX R-enabled devices such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU (and will be extended to future platforms that support DirectX R ray tracing).'

So ray tracing is a core part of the new Minecraft engine. Excellent. However... Microsoft is still tight-lipped about what this new ray-tracing demo for the Xbox Series X actually means. Despite last year's quotes about the future platform, the Xbox Series X has yet to be officially acknowledged. Here is what Microsoft told Windows Central when asked about the new demo: "What Austin Evans saw was a technical demo to show off Xbox Series X's hardware accelerated DirectX Raytracing capabilities. and not a product announcement.

If Mojang had already said that raytracing support was built into the new Render Dragon engine, wouldn't this product have actually already been announced? Why is it still being called a tech demo, will there still be an RTX version, and if so, is it the same one, or does it require custom work from Nvidia? These questions do not bode well for Sean's ability to leave his earthly body in the near future and become a cube-headed, ray-traced Minecraft guy.

On a more positive note, at least to my eyes, Microsoft's new tech demo looks even better than last year's Minecraft RTX video. The shot of a dark cave with light coming through a crack in the ceiling makes me want to go exploring, and the video above, released by Digital Foundry, shows a few minutes of the demo. The video also includes a crash course on the difference between simple ray tracing and the much more demanding path tracing that is being done here, and I hope that one day ray-traced Minecraft will actually be available, like Quake 2.