Nvidia recently announced that it intends to add two brand new, fully ray-traced worlds to the ongoing Minecraft RTX Windows 10 Beta, meaning that participants will be able to freely explore two maps specifically designed to demonstrate the power of path-traced ray-tracing. Basically, you get to play Minecraft, except it looks absolutely immense.
The news comes from a recently published Nvidia blog post, which describes what the additional worlds actually entail. Both worlds are being launched as a means of celebrating the recently unveiled Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics card, and will be free to download from the Minecraft Marketplace.
You can check out the most recent Minecraft RTX Beta trailer in the video embedded below, which gives you a pretty decent look at Portal Pioneers and Fins n' Flippers.
The first new world, Portal Pioneers, is a map created by Cyclone Design. Impressively, it features a fully voiced story, an NPC robot companion, and a variety of unique biomes specifically engineered to highlight what ray-tracing is capable of achieving in Minecraft. You can explore Portal Pioneers - which also includes lots of brand new monsters, puzzles, and its own, unique secrets - either on your own or with your pals.
Meanwhile Fins n' Flippers comes from popular world-builder Razzleberries. It's more aligned with the maritime aspents of Minecraft, featuring an abandoned aquarium, loads of coral reefs, and a wide range of new flora and fauna specifically created for this world.
As well as adding two new worlds to the game, the most recent Minecraft RTX Beta update introduces several other changes, including enhanced sky visuals for The End and the Nether. As a means of further improving Minecraft's ray-tracing capabilities, Mojang and Nvidia have implemented adaptive denoising, enhanced tonemapping tunes, and a Microsoft DirectX 12 update, which increases the game's overall performance. In simpler terms, they've done lots of fancy stuff to make it look nicer.
If you'd like to check out the Minecraft RTX Windows 10 Beta for yourself, you can sign up at the link.