How to enable ray tracing in Minecraft

Minecraft has seen many substantial upgrades over the years, but none have elevated the visuals as much as ray tracing has. The widely adopted graphics rendering technique for this generation of technology helps add an attractive aesthetic of realism to the blocky, retro-inspired visuals of the open-world survival and exploration game.

So what exactly is ray tracing and how can you enable it on your platform of choice? This guide covers everything you need to know.

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What does ray tracing do in Minecraft and how to enable it on PC

Ray tracing adds a night and day difference (Image via Mojang)

In Minecraft Bedrock Edition, ray tracing has been implemented in various facets of rendering. This includes:

• Ray-traced Lighting: Governs the lighting, including sun rays and light shafts.
• Ray-traced Dynamic Shadows: Affects shadows, resulting in softer, more realistic shadows.
• Ray-traced Ambient Occlusion: Casts realistic shadow fills between object crevices not affected by lighting.
• Ray-traced Reflections: Reflections can appear sharp or diffused depending on the materials.
• Ray-traced Refractions: Bounce lighting is indirectly poured across adjacent objects, affecting the color.

As for enabling it on PC, there is no default ray tracing toggle. Here is the process to go about it manually:

• Download a ray tracing-enabled world from the Minecraft Marketplace or create a PBR (Physically Based Rendering) texture pack and enter the world.
• Head to the Settings menu.
• Under General, click on the Video tab.
• Click on the Ray Tracing toggle to turn it on.

If you do not have an RT-enabled world or the appropriate texture packs in Minecraft, you will be unable to use the ray-traced graphical features as the options will be grayed out. To wrap it up, here are the system requirements to be eligible to use ray tracing smoothly in the game:

• OS: Windows 64-bit
• CPU: Intel Core i5 or equivalent
• GPU: DirectX hardware ray tracing capable GPU like NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series and higher, and AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series and higher
• RAM: 8 GB of RAM or more
• Minecraft: Bedrock Edition at version 1.16.200 or higher

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Do PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of Minecraft have ray tracing?

So far, this technique is only available on PC. If you are on other platforms, especially PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, you will be unable to experience it even though you have RT-capable hardware. There has been speculation about Microsoft updating the Xbox Series X|S versions with ray tracing, but nothing has been officially announced yet.

Naturally, last-gen (i.e. PS4 and Xbox One) and Nintendo Switch versions of the game are incapable of using ray tracing because they lack the dedicated hardware for rendering.