It’s no secret that Nvidia is revamping certain classics to add ray tracing (opens in new tab) support. In August, it revealed that Minecraft was going to be one of these titles (opens in new tab). What we did not know, however, is what kind of hardware gamers would require to run Minecraft with RTX.
If you’re gaming at 1080p resolution (opens in new tab), you'll probably need an RTX 2060 (opens in new tab) or better to hit 60 frames per second (fps), as reported by Game Debate (opens in new tab) and PCGamesN (opens in new tab). However, this isn't a guarantee; both reports say this is just what Nvidia is targeting.
For higher resolutions, the RTX 2080 Super (opens in new tab)and RTX 2080 Ti (opens in new tab) are expected to be able to smoothly run Minecraft with GeForce RTX at 4K (opens in new tab).
Ouch, that's all a hefty ask. However, I suppose the 'I built a $2,000 gaming PC but only use it to play Minecraft' joke won’t be a joke anymore.
That being said, it seems Minecraft may seriously benefit from ray tracing, if Nvidia's screenshots and videos are any evidence.
The RTX 2060 is Nvidia's most affordable card that comes with the RT cores for ray tracing. The Founder's Edition variants carries a $399 MSRP.
It’s not yet clear when the Minecraft with RTX update will land, but we do know that it will come as a free update for those who own the game.