‘The Nether Update’ is finally getting ray tracing with Minecraft beta

Instead of the typical beta or snapshot for Minecraft today, Mojang Studios is mixing things up a little bit with a major update for Minecraft with RTX ray tracing. The 1.16.30.52 beta brings Minecraft with RTX all the way up to the Nether Update. The beta also totes some bug fixes, general improvements, and a selection of new free maps available through the Minecraft Marketplace.

The 1.16.20.52 beta for Minecraft with RTX includes:

General

• Added additional free worlds in Marketplace
• Updated to Nether Update
• Improved End Dimension in ray tracing
• Updated to DXR v1.1
• Various performance and stability fixes

Graphical and rendering

• Player’s Hand no longer clips through blocks with Raytracing enabled
• Many map rendering issues resolved
• Updated DLSS upscaling
• Improved dark noise at edges of view when turning the camera
• Improved ‘ghosting’ when removing lights, more responsive shadows
• Disocclusion improvements in dark areas
• Improvement to how glass looks when you see it in reflections
• Fix for missing detail in per-pixel emissives with low res textures
• Improved specular reflections of metals
• Improvements to night vision

Sky and brightness improvements

• Improved cloud appearance
• Improved sky appearance at different times of day
• Sky lighting matches weather during rain and thunder
• Improved brightness and volumetrics when teleporting or changing time of day
• General brightness improvements
• Improved sun and moon intensity
• Improvements to the End sky
• Sunlight no longer visible when some chunks are not rendered in Nether

Texture creation

• Flipbook textures are now supported with physically based materials
• Grassy dirt blocks support PBR

It looks like the restrictions on Minecraft RTX still exist, and only specifically designated maps that can be downloaded from the Minecraft Marketplace will be able to enable these hyper-realistic lighting features. Because of this, you can’t actually visit the Nether with ray tracing quite yet, but this is still a major improvement for Minecraft with RTX. Doubly important, if Minecraft with ray tracing comes to the Xbox Series X.