Minecraft RTX Beta Is Almost Here At Last

Back in August, Mojang and NVIDIA announced that ray tracing was on the way to Minecraft. At the time, the companies said that ray tracing features would launch in beta at some point in 2020, then went more or less silent about the feature after that. Today, the two are back with details on when that beta will launch, and it turns out it's just around the corner.Minecraft's RTX beta will kick off on Thursday, April 16th, 2020. The beta will only be available on Windows 10 and will bring "fully path-traced rendering, physically-based materials, and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 to Minecraft." You can check out some examples of this in the brief announcement trailer below.

The beta will house six creator worlds that were made to show off the capabilities of ray tracing within Minecraft: Aquatic Adventure RTX by Dr_Bond; Of Temples and Totems RTX by Razzleberries; Crystal Palace RTX by GeminiTay; Imagination Island RTX by BlockWorks; Color, Light and Shadow RTX by PearlescentMoon; and Neon District RTX by Elysium Fire. Beyond those six worlds, there's also the Razzleberries RTX Texture Showcase by – you guessed it – Razzleberries, which will allow you to test out texture packs.

Of course, you won't be limited to just those creator worlds (which will be available in the Minecraft Marketplace), as you'll be able to create you worlds during the RTX beta as well. Realms are disabled in the beta just like they are in all other Minecraft betas, and if you have a Java world you'd like to port over to the Bedrock Edition, you can do that as well.

You can read more about the beta in NVIDIA's lengthy blog post, which also details how to port a Java world to the Bedrock Edition. NVIDIA will have a new set of drivers ready to go tomorrow, April 15th, so if you've got an RTX card (which is required to run the beta), be sure to install those so you're ready for the beta's arrival on the 16th.