

People playing on phones, consoles, or graphics cards without ray tracing capabilities obviously won’t be able to see the cutting-edge lighting effects even in RTX-enabled worlds, whenever cross-platform capabilities open up. When ray tracing enters the mainstream branch, you’ll be able to play cross-platform with people on other devices, as is standard for Minecraft’s Windows 10 version. For now, multiplayer’s limited only to people running the RTX beta with GeForce GPUs inside their PCs. It’s eye-opening, though again, we can’t talk about impressions quite yet. You can manually disable Upscaling and ray tracing once you’re in one of these new worlds, to see the difference between RTX on and off. “Color, Light, & Shadow,” meanwhile, is a more straightforward tech demo of sorts for the newfangled technology.

“Imagination Island’s” central palace is built with stunning stained glass “Aquatic Adventure” focuses on how light interacts with water and “Of Temples & Totems” features glowing lava fields and luscious jungles, for example. These beautiful maps show off what full-blown path tracing is capable of, with wildly varied environments and feature sets.

