Ray-tracing is going to be a thing we associate with next-gen graphics - something we've gone in-depth about - and something that can make even the most basic looking titles look nothing short of stunning. Cases in point, 1997's Quake II and this millennium's Minecraft, two titles that NVIDIA has used to showcase the tech -- the latter of which is now running on Xbox Series X hardware.

Which fully supports DirectX hardware ray-tracing. As per NVIDIA and Mojang's PC implementation this is full path-tracing meaning all lighting elements are ray-traced from global illumination to shadows to god rays to reflections. It's an impressive tech demo that instantly turns the simple visuals of Minecraft into a high-tech beast. Check it out -- courtesy of Digital Foundry.



Running at 1080p the ray-tracing Minecraft demo was ported to the Xbox Series X by a single engineer over the course of about four weeks. It's impressive and immediately stakes a claim for the Xbox Series X to be capable of the sort of ray-tracing seen on PC with NVIDIA's RTX line. No word yet as to when the ray-tracing update will hit Minecraft on PC -- or even Xbox Series X -- but we fully expect it to launch if not soon then later on in the year.