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However, an excellent place to start is with alternate shaders and Optifine. While traditional shader-based graphics don’t look as good as ray tracing, you can get pretty close! There are many options, and this isn’t a guide for alternative shaders in Minecraft.
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There are shaders for anything you want to achieve on a computer screen.
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There are shaders to make things look wet and shaders to make things look lit or in shadow. “Shaders” refer to pixel shaders, which are special graphics programs that help determine the exact color and brightness value that every pixel in the game should have. While you can’t get true ray tracing, there are many alternative shader packs you can download to change the game’s look dramatically. Not everyone is in the position to buy the latest GPU, or perhaps you prefer the Java Edition of Minecraft, which lacks the microtransactions and Windows 10 and 11 lock-ins. No Ray-Tracing GPU? Try Alternative Shaders and OptiFine If you want ray-traced Minecraft, the only place is a PC using the Bedrock Edition. If you’re already signed in through Windows, this should happen automatically.Īlthough Microsoft has demonstrated a ray-traced version of Minecraft running on the Xbox Series X, as we write this, there is no indication that this will become an official feature. Once you launch the game, you’ll have to sign in with your Microsoft Account. Purchase Minecraft Bedrock Edition in the Microsoft Store App or install it from the Xbox app if you’re a Game Pass subscriber. It’s also a good idea to update Windows if there are any pending updates. The first thing to do is update your GPU drivers to the latest version. There’s no need to purchase the Bedrock Edition if you have bought the Java Edition in the past unless you don’t want to play through Game Pass. If you’re a first-time subscriber, you can usually get the first month for a dollar to try it out and see if it works for you. You should also note that the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft is available through Xbox Game Pass for PC or Game Pass Ultimate. If you have a low-end RX 6000 GPU, you may have some performance issues with ray tracing in Minecraft, especially if you crank up the detail. While Radeon RX 6000-series cards support hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, they don’t have dedicated hardware like Nvidia’s RTX cards. The Java version of Minecraft, which is still immensely popular, doesn’t support ray tracing. This version is also known as the Windows 10 Edition, but it works just as well on Windows 11. Only the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft supports ray tracing at the time of writing.
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