- 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 sponsor, Cablemod. Cablemod offers quality
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Linus to get 10% off. (button clicks) (techno music) Wow, I should've 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've 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 gonna 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 saved
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.gg, 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 that, 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, it ended up being less
than a 10% performance hit compared to using the lowest,
8 render distance with RTX on. Every other visual
setting we left turned on. Beginning with the lowest
and RTX-supported option, an RTX 2060 KO from EVGA. After loading in 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 oof. 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 was 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. (groans) Moving up to 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 ii 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 oversaturated, 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 SonicEther releases his software, Path-Traced 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 sort of 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 head room, 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.ltt.gg. 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 about the way I work these segues in. Drop.com is featuring the
Sennheiser HD6XX headphones. These are one of their
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versatile for everyday use, and a quarter inch adapter
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Sennheiser's long-term support. They're super comfy. Basically, they're great headphones, and you can buy them today at the link in 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. It's hosted in a proper data center now and all that good stuff, but what the hey, it was a fun experiment.
A couple of things:
1- The smearing effect it's not because "the lighting is still calculating", that's due to the denoiser struggling to keep up and showing contributions of previous frames, if a raw input version was enabled we would see no ghosting but the image would be very noisy, I think they're trying to mitigate the problem for the final release;
2- Minecraft RTX cannot be compared to other RTX titles like Control or Wolfenstein YB because it's a different beast, this is fully path traced whereas the other titles use RT sparingly only for selected effects (the most extensive being Control with diffused indirect lighting, contact shadows and reflections). The only other game that we can compare Minecraft RTX with is Quake II RTX, which has similar performance and quality. To understand a bit better, consider that a 1080Ti can run BFV at reasonable FPS, although it tends to dip heavily in RTX heavy scenes, but will run Quake II RTX, another fully path traced title, at about 10FPS (around 60FPS on a 2080).
I have been playing RTX Minecraft , it’s pretty neat so far , the lighting is amazing and I recommend everyone try it
It’s the future for sure