Higher rendering distances will put more of a strain on the CPU, but certainly running with 64 chunks isn't uncommon. Note that in vanilla Minecraft, the rendering distance can be set as high as 96 chunks (it used to be 160, or perhaps that varies by map). We're focusing on native rendering for the most part, but we do have a couple of DLSS results in the charts to show how that can affect things. We're testing at four settings: 1920x1080 with 8 RT Chunks rendering distance, and 1920x1080, 2560x1440, and 3840x2160 with a 24 RT Chunks rendering distance - the maximum available. For these tests, we're only looking at the impact of the GPU, and we've more or less maxed out all of the other hardware to eliminate bottlenecks as much as possible. While those do matter to some extent, especially if you're using something like an RTX 4090, we feel that anyone trying to run Minecraft RTX will likely have at least 16GB of memory and a reasonably capable CPU. We previously tested Minecraft RTX using other CPUs and different memory conditions. (The Intel drivers are the main change with this update, as the latest release has improved Minecraft RTX performance quite a bit.) We'll have more details on the ray tracing implementation of Minecraft below, but let's get to the benchmarks first, since that's likely why you're here.

We've now tested Minecraft RTX on every DXR-capable graphics card, ranging from the lowly AMD RX 6400 and Nvidia RTX 3050 up to the chart topping 4090. Second, with cards like the Nvidia RTX 4090 now available, you can still get very good performance even at maxed out settings. So why would anyone want to turn on ray tracing in the first place, if the performance hit is so severe? First: Look at all the shiny surfaces! Minecraft RTX is a completely different looking game compared to vanilla Minecraft. As impressive as that might seem, there's probably still room for additional improvements. In our test sequence, we saw gains of up to 43%.

The driver notes indicate up to a 35% improvement in performance with Minecraft RTX. We retested all of the Intel Arc GPUs with the latest 31.0.101.4369 drivers.

Rtx shaders minecraft