Minecraft Java players have waited years for the kind of ray tracing Bedrock got back in 2020, and NVIDIA just handed it to them for free. Today the company released RTX Remix for Minecraft, a beta mod that renders Minecraft: Java Edition 1.21.1 with real-time path tracing, and it put the whole thing on GitHub as open source so the community can keep building on it.
Watch the short YouTubeNvidia Announces RTX Mod for Minecraft: Java Edition
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“This is a beta. It was built as a technology showcase, but we love Minecraft and want it to succeed as a rendering mod,” NVIDIA writes in the project’s notes, adding that it hopes the community helps fill out what’s missing.
Every block, mob and item is lit by a path tracer
Every block, mob and item is lit by a path tracer, so light bounces off walls, passes through glass and spills out of torches the way it would in a film renderer. Shadows, reflections and the colour one block casts onto its neighbours are calculated rather than painted in.
- Lighting that follows the game: time of day, weather, being underwater and each dimension’s sky change the look automatically.
- A new block: the Copper Beacon, a craftable directional lamp whose beam is a real light source.
- Camera flythroughs: record a path by walking it, then replay it for videos or before-and-after comparisons.
- In-game settings: distances, framerate, sky, exposure and materials all live in the Options menu, and F8 toggles path tracing on and off.
NVIDIA also built two optional extras: a showcase world made by the Minecraft build team BlockWorks, which the renderer was tuned against, and an RTX art pack from NVIDIA’s own artists that follows the LabPBR texture standard.
You need an RTX 30-series card and Minecraft 1.21.1
- Windows 10 or 11
- Minecraft: Java Edition 1.21.1 on a Microsoft account that owns the game
- A GeForce RTX 30-series or newer GPU with NVIDIA driver 616.92 or newer
- About 5 GB of free space during install (about 3 GB stays used), and 16 GB of system memory recommended
Installing takes three steps: download the release archive from the GitHub releases page, extract it and run install.bat, then launch the “NVIDIA RTX Remix for Minecraft” profile from your launcher. The installer sets up Java 21, the Fabric mod loader and the RTX Remix runtime for you.
Two things to know first. The mod is not an official Minecraft product, and NVIDIA states it is not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft. And while the mod itself collects no data, the RTX Remix runtime it uses can send basic session information and crash reports to NVIDIA, both on by default; you can switch them off in the Permissions tab of the RTX Remix graphics settings.
It’s a beta, and NVIDIA says so
NVIDIA is upfront about the rough edges. The mod targets Minecraft 1.21.1 only, it has had limited testing alongside other mods, and blocks, mobs and places the showcase world never visits “have had less care, and some will look wrong or run slowly.” Ports to newer Minecraft versions are something it hopes the community takes on, and the code is released under the Apache 2.0 license to make that possible.
Early reaction from players is mixed. Plenty of Java fans already run fan-made shader packs and say they’ll stick with them, and much of the criticism in the Reddit thread is aimed at the look of NVIDIA’s showcase textures rather than the lighting itself. Since the art pack is optional and the renderer reads standard LabPBR textures, that’s the part most likely to change as players start pairing it with their own packs.
For anyone with an RTX card who has watched Bedrock’s ray tracing from the sidelines, it’s free to try today.
