PC Minecraft RTX Beta Released

[AbsolutSurgen]

Minecraft's RTX beta is out now - and it's simply beautiful

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In stark contrast, virtually everything in Minecraft RTX is path traced, and the execution here is next-level stuff - even when stacked up against Nvidia's own work with Quake 2 RTX. Hardware acceleration allows for a far greater degree of fidelity, and the traversal of light can be mapped across many more bounces for even more remarkable effects. A temporally-based 'irradiance cache' maps the traversal of light across multiple frames, allowing for up to eight bounces of light, allowing for a 'hall of mirrors' effect when multiple reflective surfaces are in play - even spoon-like reflections are possible. On top of that, voxel-based volumetric lighting is integrated with path traced lighting for some deeply impressive god ray-style effect.

Of course, we've seen an offshoot of this DXR version of Minecraft play out in an Xbox Series X tech demo, where at native 1080p resolution, the new Microsoft console delivered variable frame-rates north of 30fps. An ambitious ray tracing solution demands a lot of GPU muscle and as you would expect, the same is true of the Minecraft RTX beta. That's where Nvidia's DLSS 2.0 technology helps out in ensuring that any RTX graphics card can still deliver a high frame-rate experience.

It's usually the case that multiple quality modes are available in DLSS 2.0-enabled titles, but things are pared back for the beta - something which we hope is a temporary affair with full functionality rolled out for the final game. As things stand right now, output resolution is established by your choice of desktop resolution (in common with many of Microsoft's DX12 efforts) and from there DLSS reconstructs from a pre-defined lower resolution. So effectively, 1080p DLSS reconstructs from 720p, while 1440p upscales from 835p. Moving up to full 4K, this is reconstructed from a native 1080p. These figures may sound low, but we've talked in the past about how effective Nvidia's new AI upscaling algorithm is - and with Minecraft's relatively simplistic aesthetic, DLSS 2.0 easily passes for native resolution rendering.

Consequently, there are few issues running the Minecraft RTX beta on any desktop RTX card and to get a flavour of overall performance across the stack, we tried out the beta on the extreme ends of the RTX stack. The takeaway is that an RTX 2080 Ti can run 4K DLSS at 60fps on most content (we only saw drops into the 50s moving underwater), while 1080p DLSS on a desktop RTX 2060 produces equivalent performance. The only potential issue we could see would be in running Minecraft RTX on the laptop version of the RTX 2060 - which is a fair chunk slower than its desktop equivalent (a native 540p DLSS performance mode that resolves at 1080p should address this, however). In short, Minecraft RTX delivers the best of both worlds - you get to see the hardware accelerated version push the envelope in terms of fidelity, while Nvidia's brand new AI upscaling tech does a really good job of mitigating the performance hit.

The only other factor worth commenting on is that path tracing isn't just computationally expensive - it's demanding on memory too. The RTX 2060 possesses 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which is fine for 1080p DLSS rendering, and while 1440p performance worked out Okay bearing in mind the additional pixel-count, hopes of a 4K30 experience were dashed. In this scenario, we saw a lot of stutter as the game maxed out the available memory. To run at 4K with consistent performance, an 8GB RTX card is recommended.

 

 

[crispy4000]

Also hearing that performance can vary wildly based on the map tested.

[Mr.Vic20]

5 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

Also hearing that performance can vary wildly based on the map tested.

Given the nature of the tech, that actually makes total sense. You could easily arrange loads of RT elements in the environment to utterly crush any available GPU. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

9 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

Also hearing that performance can vary wildly based on the map tested.

Watching the video now -- they're commenting that they saw dips while underwater, particularly on complex maps.  Didn't find that issue when on dry land.

 

2060 is getting ~60 fps on 1080p (DLSS Quality mode), ~30fps at 4k (DLSS Performance mode) on dry land.

[crispy4000]

10 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Watching the video now -- they're commenting that they saw dips while underwater, particularly on complex maps.  Didn't find that issue when on dry land.

 

2060 is getting ~60 fps on 1080p (DLSS Quality mode), ~30fps at 4k (DLSS Performance mode) on dry land.

 

Transparencies are one of the bigger issues.

 

[AbsolutSurgen]

My boys really want this, but Coronavirus has pretty much ensured that this isn't in my future this year.

[Mr.Vic20]

3 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

My boys really want this, but Coronavirus has pretty much ensured that this isn't in my future this year.

Because of the lack of GPU or just the game or both? 

[AbsolutSurgen]

Just now, Mr.Vic20 said:

Because of the lack of GPU or just the game or both? 

Lack of GPU.

We're living on severance right now, so a new GPU isn't in the Budget.  (I'm in a much better situation than most right now, so I'm not complaining.)

[Dre801]

It looks really good, but alas, I'm rocking a  5700XT, lol.

[Keyser_Soze]

Download your game ready driver now!