Minecraft 'RTX' update brings incredible new ray tracing graphics to game

Game now looks ever so slightly less blocky

Minecraft has received a vast graphic upgrade that completely redefines how the game looks.

The world's best-selling game has been updated with new lighting and a completely different appearance, which makes the game look vastly better than it did before.

The upgrade is the result of a collaboration between developers Mojang and Microsoft, and Nvidia. Together, they will bring ray tracing to the game, which allows light inside the blocky world to be rendered in a newly realistic way.

The updates will come to the Windows version of the game soon. And it will be available as a free upgrade to all PC users, allowing anyone with an Nvidia RTX enabled graphics card to play it.

“Ray tracing sits at the center of what we think is next for Minecraft,” Saxs Persson, the creative director of Minecraft at Microsoft, said in a statement. “RTX gives the Minecraft world a brand-new feel to it.

"In normal Minecraft, a block of gold just appears yellow, but with ray tracing turned on, you really get to see the specular highlight, you get to see the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in it.”

Nvidia claims that the changes will "affect almost every pixel of every scene" and make lighting, reflections, shadows and more appear different than they did before.

It will do so using path tracing, which is a form of the ray tracing technology that allows light to be drawn realistically and in real time. That will allow light to move naturally as it would in real life, even as players change up the blocks that make up the world.

The ray tracing technology will be moddable in the same way that the game itself is. That will allow players to create new kinds of ray traced content, building them in the same way they do mods for the rest of the Minecraft game.