All eyes might be on the next-gen “Ampere” graphics architecture Nvidia announced during today’s digital GTC 2020 keynote, eager to catch a glimpse of what’s coming to future GeForce graphics cards, but another announcement benefits owners of existing GeForce RTX 20-series GPUs. Today, Nvidia released not one, not two, but five more ray-traced worlds crafted for Minecraft by several community creators.

A Minecraft beta enabled real-time ray tracing and Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS 2.0 technology in late April. Even in beta form, the 11-year-old game became the immediate standard-bearer for the cutting-edge lighting technology. This version of the game uses full path tracing rather than enabling ray tracing for one or two specific effects. That means all lighting in the game happens with rays, delivering incredibly realistic shadows, lighting, reflections, and more.

Nvidia got the ball rolling with the beta by releasing six creator-made worlds built to showcase various ray tracing effects and Minecraft’s new physically based textures. On Thursday, the company announced five more, bringing the total number of Nvidia-sponsored RTX worlds to eleven. Here’s how the company describes each:

You can find all eleven worlds in the Marketplace of the Windows 10 version of Minecraft right now. You’ll need Windows 10, a copy of Minecraft from the Microsoft Store, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card, as those are the only GPUs that include dedicated real-time ray tracing hardware. You’ll also need to enroll in the Minecraft beta to grab the RTX-enabled build of the game.

This story, "Nvidia releases 5 more free ray-traced Minecraft worlds" was originally published by PCWorld.

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