Opinion: I was a ray tracing snob, but the pretty block game has taken me down a peg.
I’ve been a huge fan of Minecraft almost as far back as its initial release – over a decade ago if anyone else needs to feel older than they should – and though I haven’t played it consistently over the last few years, it’s always been something I crawl back to when I need a few chill evenings away from competitive gaming environments. When the beta for Minecraft with RTX was announced, I was actually rather confused. A large reason I loved the game was because of its ridiculously low system requirements. You can almost run it on a toaster if needed, but its accessibility was a great selling point. Whether it was my beaten-up laptop or the old family desktop computer, it was always a game that my siblings and I could play. The friends I had back then that could afford dedicated gaming computers could run beautiful games that demanded beefier components, even when the graphics in games like Skyrim or Crysis 2 reduced down to the lowest playable settings. Minecraft was an equal playing field, not in a unique sense, but the popularity of a game that made zero effort to look ‘pretty’ was truly impressive. At the end of the day, a block was a block. Only, it isn’t anymore. I was skeptical of putting ray tracing into a game like Minecraft because to me, it didn’t make sense. RTX was for games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Metro Exodus, graphically demanding titles that seduced your eyeballs with buckets of atmosphere and semi-realistic environments. RTX Minecraft felt like adding sparkles to Lego. Having been lucky enough to get my hands on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, I finally have access to ray tracing in games and now that I’ve played through a few old favorites that have been enhanced by the fancy lighting effects, I’ll admit that Minecraft was the game that truly knocked my socks off. This could be because the game was so simple to begin with – I went in not expecting to be as blown away as I was, so the results took me completely by surprise. I was previously struggling to imagine how a lump of pixelated blocks would be enhanced enough to justify the low hardware requirements being sacrificed. The original version of Minecraft obviously isn’t going anywhere so I’ll still be happily running around on java for many years to come, but looking back, I think a great deal of my initial skepticism was actually FOMO due to the older gaming PC I was rocking at the time. Minecraft RTX was in beta before the launch of the Ampere GPU series, so the only folk who could play it at the time were those who had the cash for the pricey Nvidia Turing hardware.
