On Monday, Mojang and Nvidia kicked off this week's Gamescom gaming conference by unveiling a substantial update for the blocky, mega-popular game Minecraft: a visual patch coming exclusively to owners of Nvidia RTX graphics cards for the game's Windows 10 version. This comes seven days after another similar patch, which would have been free for all Xbox and Windows players, was canceled after two years of delays.
Minecraft's 'Super Duper Graphics Pack' Canceled. First announced during E3 2017, the ambitious new look for Minecraft proved a little too ambitious and Mojang decided it was time to scrap the idea. The Super Duper Graphics Pack is coming to Minecraft in 2018, and as a taste of what's to come we’ve made this Super Duper Musical for you and your wolf bud. Super Duper Grafix 16x. If I have get some comments/downloads I will continue it and make it a full pack. Minecraft 1.14 R. Super Duper Grafix.
And while that canceled 'Super Duper' patch looked impressive, this one takes the intentionally chunky, lo-fi Minecraft to an entirely new level, thanks to a heavy emphasis on ray tracing. All of Nvidia's RTX graphics cards include a dedicated core designed to efficiently map out massive amounts of light bounces in 3D imagery. This core's effects on Minecraft might be the most impressive yet for an RTX-compatible game.
The upgrade's reveal trailer shows exactly how this 'path tracing' patch will look in action, with more realistic looking models for light bouncing and reflection. The game's pixellated 'gold' blocks now glisten like gold. Reflective materials now mirror whatever mobs walk near them. Light cast upon different kinds of materials will naturally glow, and underground caverns will now smolder in impressive red light seeping from nearby lava flows.
In addition to upgrades to ambient occlusion and shadow resolution, the trailer also shows a pretty dazzling overhaul to the game's water rendering system. Though the game still renders chunky 'bubble' blocks in the water, it otherwise reflects and refracts whatever light is visible both above and below the water.
No release date was given beyond '2020,' and Mojang hasn't announced whether this RTX-exclusive patch will cost extra for the game's existing owners.
AdvertisementHow much computer will it need?
A huge question lingers ahead of the feature's live previews at this week's Gamescom: how demanding will this patch be? Even higher-end GeForce RTX graphics cards, like the RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2080 Ti, have struggled to efficiently render some games' RTX-exclusive patches. Fans who play MinecraftMinecraft Super Duper Graphics Pc
's Java version on PC may already know this, thanks to a mod project enabling similar lighting and reflection tweaks (though this mod is in alpha and arguably not as pretty as today's official RTX patch reveal). We look forward to seeing direct-feed capture of the patch from Gamescom attendees and to learning how beefy a PC is being used in these demos.We're also wondering whether the Super Duper Graphics Pack—slated to launch on all Xbox and Windows versions of Minecraft—was canceled in favor of this. While neither Mojang nor Nvidia mentioned the canceled pack, Monday's reveal video includes a telling quote: 'It's allowed the team here to just focus on Minecraft the game and Nvidia to focus on underlying technologies.'
Nvidia used Gamescom as an opportunity to lift the curtain on other RTX-exclusive patches coming to PC games in the next year, but these weren't nearly as revealing. The most dramatic tease, for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, didn't have much in the way of A/B testing. Other new trailers were even more scant on visual details.
And what about those who own Minecraft on platforms other than the combination of Windows 10 and Nvidia RTX? They too may see visual upgrades in the near future, though these may be subtler. Mojang issued its own announcement on Monday about the game's upcoming shift to an entirely new rendering pipeline in its 'Bedrock' edition, the one that is most widely ported and updated. The game's new engine is called 'Render Dragon.'
Minecraft Super Duper Graphics Pack Wiki
The blog post vaguely sums up Render Dragon's updates as 'improved emissivity, directional lighting, edge highlighting, and new lighting techniques.' Unlike the RTX patch's reveal, Mojang wasn't ready to show how intense those Render Dragon updates may look, or whether they'll come anywhere near the handsome Super Duper Graphics Pack reveal in 2017.
'Not all devices will support ray tracing, but we will have some graphics enhancements on most devices,' the official Mojang blog post says.
Minecraft Super Duper Graphics Download
Listing image by Mojang / Nvidia
A little over two years ago, Minecraft developer Mojang announced that Minecraft would be receiving an awesome, amazing, incredible graphics update. The new Super Duper Graphics Pack (we didn’t name it) was supposed to introduce a swath of new graphics features, including 4K textures, rippling water, cleaner lines, a different lighting engine, dynamic shadows, edge highlighting, and directional lighting. The video showing off the improvements was a hit back at E3 2017, and questions about when the update would be released have popped up on the Minecraft subreddit from time to time ever since.
Today, Mojang declared the Super Duper Graphics Pack update is canceled, permanently. According to the company, “Super Duper was an ambitious initiative that brought a new look to Minecraft but, unfortunately, the pack proved too technically demanding to implement as planned.”
Minecraft Super Duper Graphics Pack. Image by Microsoft.
The only explanation the company has provided for why it won’t be bringing the update is that “we aren’t happy with how the pack performed across devices. For this reason, we’re stopping development on the pack, and looking into other ways for you to experience Minecraft with a new look.”
This is a pretty thin explanation. First of all, we would have expected this kind of work — specifically, the work of deciding which devices would be targets for Minecraft’s SDGP — would have been typified before that project had begun. Minecraft runs on a huge number of devices, but you don’t typically develop an expansion like this without targets in mind, because (presumably) you’ll be testing the updates on a variety of systems as you work through them. Discovering after two years that you can’t justify the update because some products can’t run it, if true, speaks to some rather odd development priorities. Why wouldn’t you finish the update or upgrade for the systems that can?
The SDGP required a complete rewrite of the Minecraft graphics engine. Such efforts are not trivial and it isn’t crazy for a total overhaul to take two years. But at the same time, what sense does it make to scrap the rewrite after two full years in development?
Not much makes sense about this. The Super Duper Graphics Pack wasn’t supposed to break Minecraft’s ability to run on older hardware; it was supposed to provide better image quality for machines capable of running it. The upcoming launch of a new console generation and the inevitable upgrade treadmill for mobile devices should have provided a more robust hardware platform for the game relative to 2017. Mojang and Microsoft jointly declared that Minecraft has sold 176 million copies as of May 2019. The original PC version has sold 30 million copies. Microsoft continues to invest in and augment Minecraft with spinoffs like the AR-focused Minecraft Earth. If any game could possibly justify the investment of a new graphics engine a decade after launch, it’d be a title like Minecraft.
Super Duper Graphics Pack Download
The most logical implication here is that Mojang couldn’t find a way to build an engine that both delivered the capabilities they wanted at the top-end and still offered an acceptable level of performance on lower-end hardware. There might have also been fears about the impact of splitting the player base across multiple versions of the game and maintaining updates for both engines going forward. Killing off the engine update after more than two years is a fairly extreme step. Hopefully, there’ll still be a way for some of these optimizations and enhancements to be integrated into the base version. Otherwise, Mojang’s graphics team has just spent two years of work on a major engine rewrite, only to see their efforts basically flushed down the drain.
Super Duper Graphics Edition Minecraft
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