Last Monday, Microsoft announced it will no longer be releasing the Super Duper Graphics Pack that was supposed to introduce a new look for Minecraft due to performance and technical issues. And if you were disappointed by the news, you may be really happy with the latest announcement from the company.

Microsoft is today announcing some new features for Minecraft: Ray Tracing and a new Render Dragon gaming engine.

Mojang, the makers of Minecraft, is teaming up with NVIDIA to bring Ray Tracing support to Minecraft on NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPUs. The support for Ray Tracing will essentially introduce a new look for Minecraft, adding realistic lighting, volumetric water, vibrant colors, and emissive textures. Here’s a video showing off Ray Tracing in action on Minecraft (spoiler: it’s pretty gorgeous):

Microsoft is also going to introduce a new game engine called Render Dragon on devices that support the Minecraft Bedrock platform, bringing features like directional lighting and emissivity. The new game engine is used on Microsoft’s upcoming Minecraft Earth game, and it will introduce things like edge highlighting, as well as new highting techniques for Minecraft. Microsoft says the new game engine will introduce a range of graphics features that will vary depending on your hardware.

Microsoft will be launching the new Ray Tracing features in Minecraft for Windows 10 as part of a preview in 2020, and it’s being pretty tight-lipped about all the details on these new features.

Tagged with Minecraft Bedrock, Nvidia, Ray Tracing, Render Dragon, RTX