bad news everyone the r-tx 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 r-tx properly
implemented in Minecraft oh and also
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[Music]
[Applause]
Wow I shoulda turned r-tx down a long
time ago
alright 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 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
retraced 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 our tech support
in the game comes with some caveats
primarily that ray tracing is not going
to work on an on our TX 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 RT ex
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 RT x 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 mcdlt Tugg cleverly there
are also a couple of our TX tailored
maps but behind the scenes these are
just regular maps with our TX resource
packs specific to them bundled in to see
what it takes to run them we grab three
different tiers of graphics cards we use
the same CPU across the board because
spoiler alert it will make little to no
difference due to how GPU bottlenecks
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 sixteen chunks since
it's the only option that's supported
with both RT X on and off and ended up
being less than a 10% performance hit
compared to using the lowest eight
render distance with our TX on every
other visual setting we left turn into
pond beginning with the lowest end
RTX supported option an RT x 26 TKO from
EVGA after loading an imagination island
with our TX off in 1080p we were greeted
with the expected crisp clean 180 plus
FPS experience no stutters then we
turned our TX on and whoof 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 our TX 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 the LSS 2.0
allows the game to be rendered at a
lower the native resolution and then AI
upscaled
with the help of the tensor course on
our TX 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 the LS s 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 r-tx off
performance moving up to an RT X 27 T
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
RT X 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 our TX can
look than a traditional Java Edition
shader pack that is at least until sonic
ether releases his software path traced
shaders but dang
for now the our TX 2070 super is for
sure the way to go if you're looking to
buy a GPU for your spoil they have kids
so they can play Minecraft
real-time RTX at 1080p
then there's the r-tx 2080 super the
last reasonable option in the r-tx GP
lineup the improvements moving up to
this card actually we're 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 DL SS 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 delta t WG but it does
look legitimately next-gen in a way that
I'd 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 RT
X has a long and proud history of
massive performance penalties normally
we're talking like 30 to 50 percent
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 performance 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 our CX and minecraft
can offer speaking of flexible I'm real
flexible about the way I work these
segues in drop comm is featuring the
sennheiser HD 6 xx headphones these are
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over 90,000 units sold they've got an
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compared to the HD 650 so you can expect
nice balanced mid-range and natural
sounding bass they've got a detachable
six-foot cable with an 8 inch plug
that's versatile for everyday use and a
quarter inch adapter if you need one of
those and it comes with 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 like hosted in a proper data center
now and all that good stuff but what the
hey it was a fun experiment
[Music]