Minecraft's new Render Dragon engine will bring modern rendering and ray-tracing

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The recent cancellation of Minecraft’s Super Duper Graphics Pack has never stung harder; Minecraft developers Mojang will still be bringing modern rendering techniques to the voxel-based survival game with the arrival of their new Render Dragon engine.

Announced through an all-new Mojang forum post, the new Render Dragon engine update will be available on every platform that supports Minecraft Bedrock Edition. The new engine aims to improve Minecraft’s scope whilst taking advantage of existing and advancing hardware.

This new technology is already active in Minecraft games we’ve seen before: Minecraft Earth’s recent demo featured a few of the engine’s graphical tweaks. The final release will include edge highlighting and new lighting techniques, but Mojang says these are just the start of the game’s visual and performance upgrades.

Minecraft will also be taking advantage of RTX technology through a new partnership with Nvidia to bring ray-tracing to the game. Whilst ray-tracing has already been introduced through impressive third-party modifications, this official support should be more performant.

Mojang also states that they’ll be bringing ray-tracing to platforms that support Direct X R ray-tracing in the future, presumably the next-gen Xbox Scarlett.

More about the topics: minecraft, Minecraft Render Dragon, mojang, Ray tracing, RTX, Super Duper Graphics Pack, xbox scarlett