Minecraft RTX: Min PC Specs And How To Get The Beautiful Ray Traced Beta
In case you missed the news, the Minecraft with RTX beta is here, and with it comes a beautifully repainted world with path-traced rendering, physically-based materials, and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 support to bolster performance. This is essentially Minecraft with ray tracing. To run it, you will need a relatively well-equipped PC.
Specifically, the minimum requirements call for the following hardware...
- CPU: Intel Core i5 or equivalent, or better
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or better
- RAM: 8GB or more
- Storage: 2GB (game, plus all worlds and resource packs)
- Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit
The GeForce RTX 2060 is the most affordable graphics card with dedicated hardware (RT cores) for real-time ray tracing. It is also the minimum you will need to run the Minecraft with RTX beta. In our performance evaluation of the beta release, we recorded the following averages...
As you can see, it is playable on a GeForce RTX 2060, with the best performance coming from running the game at 1080p with DLSS enabled. This yielded around just a bit under 60 frames per second. You could run it without DLSS if you really wanted to, but expect a steep performance hit—we recorded an average of 31.3 fps at 1080p.
Bear in mind that this is a beta release. NVIDIA says performance will improve over time, as it further trains its DLSS 2.0 scheme.
In addition to the hardware outlined, you will also need to install the latest Windows updates, and NVIDIA's 'Game Ready' 448.87 WHQL driver release, which is obtainable through GeForce Experience or through NVIDIA's driver download page.
You also need to own a copy of Minecraft for Windows 10. This runs $26.99 in the Microsoft Store.
This is definitely worth checking out. It may see odd to apply ray-traced visuals to a game like Minecraft, but the work put into it has not been wasted. It is a gorgeous makeover that gives the game a brand new look, and is a surprisingly good example of the benefits of ray-traced visuals.
