Minecraft with RTX launches out of beta with a built-in benchmark scene

(Image credit: Mojang)

After eight months in beta, Minecraft with RTX has officially released for Windows 10 today. To celebrate the occasion, Nvidia announced two new ray-traced worlds, Colosseum and Dungeon Dash, which will bring the total number of RTX worlds to 15. Colosseum is already available, while Dungeon Dash is "coming soon."

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Surprisingly, for as simple as the graphics are in Minecraft, it turned out to be a true showcase for ray tracing. In fact, when Jacob took Minecraft with RTX for a spin earlier this year, he declared there is "no finer example of ray tracing today," noting that the advanced rendering techniques enormously amplify the blocky graphics while maintaining the simplicity that made the game a hit.

A large reason why is because the overhaul features full path tracing, meaning all the lighting in the game is ray-traced, and a physically based texture system. These are graphically intensive techniques, so the third piece of the RTX puzzle is DLSS 2.0 support.

"Physically Based Rendering texture pack in supported worlds, which interplays with the ray-traced effects to further enhance the experience. Turning on DLSS can more than double your frame rate!," Nvidia says.

You can put the claim to the test by grabbing the Portal Pioneers RTX world from the Minecraft marketplace and running the built-in benchmark, alongside something like FRAPS. It takes about 60 seconds to complete.

"You'll want your favorite frame view tool to capture performance data during the minecart ride," Nvidia explains.

Coming out of beta also means expanded multiplayer support, between Minecraft with RTX and other Minecraft players. During the beta period, multiplayer in the RTX build was exclusive between beta players.

If you have the hardware to turn RTX on (a GeForce RTX graphics card), you can grab and play Minecraft with RTX right now.

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).