bad news everyone the rtx real-time ray
tracing beta for minecraft bedrock is finally here and it looks absolutely
amazing and i'm not in office to benchmark it
for you and tell you all about it fear not though for Jake is back at the
office and he has done the benchmarking for me and i'm gonna tell you guys all
about it but first there's some really cool changes that have taken place under
the hood to get rtx properly implemented
in minecraft oh and also this message from our
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wow i should have turned rtx on a long time ago all right guys in normal
bedrock edition minecraft there are two maps for every texture in the game the
base color as well as the opacity these
maps contribute the colors as well as the transparency or how see-through
every block is however when they moved to implement ray-traced lighting there
was a pretty apparent problem regular minecraft doesn't calculate light
bouncing instead light just spreads
across any nearby surface evenly now
they could have just made every type of block bounce light in the same way
problem is that wouldn't have been true to the real world behavior of materials
and light for instance if you shine a flashlight at a mirror the majority of
that light is going to bounce right off and illuminate the surface that it
bounces to but if you were to shine a light at your
carpet chances are that most of that light will end up illuminating the
carpet itself without much bouncing to other surfaces this is because your
carpet is not very metallic or reflective and because it's very rough
relative to the smoothness of a mirror problem is in the existing version of
minecraft there is no way to define a block or a texture as reflective or
rough so for light to be able to properly bounce the developers actually
had to add four new mappings to every
texture in the game metalness or reflectiveness
emissivity or how much it should glow
roughness so how rough it is as well as
a height map where you could add artificial depth to parts of a texture
in the game with this added data ray traced lighting can be a lot more
accurate for example in the demo you're looking at right now we can see the
hardwood flooring is very smooth and reflective whereas the carpeting is
rough and doesn't reflect much light what this means is that rtx support in
the game comes with some caveats primarily that ray tracing is not going
to work on a non-rtx card even though NVIDIA has allowed this at times in the
past and it also won't work on just any old
minecraft save game right out of the box you're going to need to select an rtx
compatible resource pack to enable ray traced lighting it's not a huge deal it
just means that for the moment you're stuck to the sample texture packs that
NVIDIA and mojang have provided on the plus side it does make it super easy to
use rtx on maps that are ported over from the java version of the game which
actually looks pretty sweet if we port over the lobby of our upcoming java
edition server mc.LTT.g by the way there are also a
couple of rtx tailored maps but behind the scenes these are just regular maps
with rtx resource packs specific to them bundled in to see what it takes to run
them we grabbed three different tiers of graphics cards we used the same CPU
across the board because spoiler alert
it will make little to no difference due to how GPU bottlenecked we're expecting
to be now we tried both an experiential test just running around breaking blocks
and killing mobs to get a sense of how playable the game felt on each of our
graphics cards and then we also ran benchmarks on the NVIDIA supplied
imagination island sample map riding around one of the in-game trains on a
predefined loop we settled on a render distance of 16 chunks since it's the
only option that's supported with both rtx on and off and ended up being less
than a 10 performance hit compared to using the lowest eight render distance
with rtx on every other visual setting we left turned on beginning with the
lowest end rtx supported option an rtx
2060 ko from evga after loading an imagination island with
rtx off in 1080p we were greeted with the expected crisp clean 180 plus FPS
experience no stutters then we turned rtx on and uh
woof we were both shocked and a bit relieved
experientially the game actually feels a bit less responsive to movements but
it was playable with no noticeable stuttering and an average FPS of 53
although that is less than a third of what we had with rtx off we also noticed
that when interacting with the environment like playing or breaking
blocks or opening doors we could see the shadows being processed which made it
feel a little disingenuous to call it real time ray tracing
it's honestly kind of a bit jarring this is where another newly introduced
technology comes into play though dlss 2.0 allows the game to be rendered at a
lower than native resolution and then ai
upscaled with the help of the tensor cores on rtx gpus it actually works
really well and we didn't notice a visual difference with it enabled versus
disabled the only problem is that 50-ish FPS number that we mentioned
earlier that was with dlss turned on
already and if we switch it off we're actually looking at closer to 30 FPS on
average or about a sixth of our rtx off
performance moving up to an rtx 2070 super is where
the experience starts to feel a lot smoother with an average of 72 frames
per second the sluggishness we felt with the 2060 ko is completely gone and i
think it's safe to say that this is definitely the sweet spot for 1080p rtx
on minecraft at the moment and now that it's running decently we can actually
take a second to appreciate this i think in some of the example maps the colors
in direct sunlight are probably a bit over saturated and some textures like
water could stand to have their reflectiveness toned down like it kind
of makes the game feel like one of those cheap minecraft clones
however when you get into a map with some interior lighting and some Windows
the god rays are insane or in something
like this cave area the way the light bounces around is just
stunning like it really goes to show how much better rtx can look than a
traditional java edition shader pack that is at least until sonic ether
releases his software path trace shaders but dang for now the rtx 2070 super is
for sure the way to go if you're looking to buy a GPU for your spoiled af kids so
they can play minecraft with real-time rtx
at 1080p then there's the rtx 2080 super
the last reasonable option in the rtx GPU lineup
the improvements moving up to this card actually were surprisingly unimpressive
with an average FPS of 80 compared to the 72 average on the 2070 super now
that is technically an upgrade but i would say it's probably not worth the
money for this specific use case
at least at 1080p but hey since we've got a bit of headroom how about 1440p
or even 4k yeah
good luck with that 1440p with dlss on
brings our 2080 super right down to 61 FPS
so that's usable and as for 4k
well it's approaching what i would consider
to be playable at around 41 FPS average
but the thing is that's not the kind of experience anyone spending 750 us
dollars on a graphics card wants to have
with all of that in mind was it worth the wait
well it's not something we're gonna switch development of our LTT servers to
bedrock for by the way you can check out the beta at mc.lt.g but it does look
legitimately next-gen in a way that i never thought i'd hear myself say about
minecraft as for the performance the beta is a bit of a poop demonstration i
mean even on a 750 us dollar graphics
card it's really only playable at 1440p
max and then forget about getting the most out of your high refresh rate
gaming display and while rtx has a long
and proud history of massive performance penalties normally we're talking like 30
to 50 massive not more than that massive so what we're
hoping is that with some optimizations they can get it to be a little bit more
performant and if they do honestly i am pretty stoked to see what
the community can do to make even better and more unique builds and really cool
looking experiences with the extra flexibility that rtx and minecraft can
offer speaking of flexible i'm real flexible
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the video description if you guys enjoyed this video you might
also enjoy the one where we made our own minecraft server we actually didn't end
up leaving that one deployed um it's like hosted in a proper data center now
and all that good stuff but what the hey it was a fun experiment