Minecraft Ray Tracing with old PC

In this post we'll add Ray tracing to Minecraft running on old pc , with no RTX enabled card.

What's Ray Tracing :

Ray Tracing is an algorithm used by a computer graphics software to track and simulate the way light

rays interact with world objects . (Wiki)

And one of the first attempts to create a photorealistic was borrowed from the physics literature .

When studying lenses physicists traced with pen and paper the path taken by rays of light starting at a light source , then passing through the lens and slightly beyond. This process of following the movement of  light rays through matter  was called ' ray tracing'.

In real life any light source emits a billions of photons . These photons travel till they reach an object, where they'll reflect from countless times to any other object in the ambient surrounding bringing with them information's like color or light, until they eventually reach our eyes or die due to absorption .

Ray Tracing works in revers: Rays are sent starting from the virtual camera situated in the scene making up the digital world and, once they hit an object , they send new rays to every light source the scene.

Ray-Tracing Disadvantages in general:

However with all the pros aside , Ray tracing for most graphics cards can have a huge performance impact depending on what settings the ray tracing features are set to , and implementing Minecraft Ray tracing is no exception

NVidia RTX:

RTX facilitates a huge evolution  in computer graphics of generating interactive images that respond to lighting, shadows and reflections. RTX is supported on NVidia Volta-, Turing- and Ampere-based GPUs, that come natively  with  Tensor cores (and new RT cores starting with Turing family  and successors) on the architectures for ray-tracing acceleration.

Ray-Traced Minecraft Image.

Cost prohibitive:

                                                Nvidia Shop

With the latest RTX enabled card costing more that 1,500 $ 

If you are not of those people who really need the best possible components or want to be ahead of the curve then going with the RTX GPUs isn’t worth it, especially now  , when only a handful of games support the features.

 If you follow the trends, you'll realize that Nvidia hasn’t made any huge performance leap  since the 800 series. So, if you have a high-end card from either the 800 or 900 series then getting RTX isn’t worth it.

Reshade and software based solutions:

ReShade is a software developed by crosire that uses  unique post-processing effects injector for games and video . Imagine your favorite game with ambient occlusion, real depth of field effects, color correction and more ... ReShade provides a generic API to access both frame color and depth information , and all the tools to create an immersive experience .

The sky is the limit! Enable advanced ambient occlusion, depth-edge-detection-driven SMAA antialiasing, screen space , depth of field effects, chromatic aberration, dynamic film grain, automatic saturation and color correction, cross processing, multi-pass blurring ... you name it.

Using Reshad with minecraft:

To enable ray tracing in minecraft or any game ,

you have to properly install Reshade in your game folder by following the steps below:

1. Head to Reshade website and Download the latest version 4.9.1.
2. Grab the Ray-tracing preset from this link  
3. Install Reshade on your PC.
4. Open the software and choose the game you want to use Reshade with ( in this case choose minecraft )
5. Reshade will install a folder called shaders and textures inside the game folder.
6. We have to patch this folder with our RT MOD downloaded above.

If you're having difficulty installing Reshade with Minecraft you can follow this video Tutorial :