Minecraft for Windows 10 has recently launched a beta for its new ray tracing suite, but you can’t participate with the regular client. If you want to craft beautiful new worlds with ray tracing enabled you’ll need the beta client.
The Minecraft for Windows 10 beta client can be downloaded from the Xbox Insider Hub.
Because ray tracing in Minecraft for Windows 10 is in beta (therefore a “preview” in Microsoft terms) you’ll need to download the Minecraft Beta client. A quick caveat to all of this: you need to own the game digitally for this to work: disc versions of the game are not supported.
The first thing you need to do is download the Xbox Insider Hub from the Windows Store. Just open the store and search for the Xbox Insider Hub. Once it has downloaded launch the app and navigate to Insider Content, where you should find the Minecraft Beta. Select Join and you are in – your game will update to the beta client.
You can either download creator-generated maps that already have ray tracing added, or you can create your own assets with the toolkit. No matter what you choose remember this is a beta, and issues are to be expected. Also, the Nether and the End currently do not support ray tracing in the Minecraft Beta. For a list of known bugs check the list Mojang posted here. Remember, you’ll need at least an RTX 2060 if you want to participate, so those of us with older 10-series Nvidia cards or AMD GPUs will have to sit this one out. Bummer.
