RenderDragon

Minecraft is on so many platforms, and the great thing about that is that it opens up so many fun possibilities about how we can change the experience for each one. We added touch controls when we developed the mobile version, put you ​inside ​Minecraft on Gear VR, and enabled multiplayer across consoles and devices with our Better Together update!

Today we’re announcing two new ways we’re taking advantage of existing and updating hardware. One, we’re expanding the scope of Minecraft on bedrock platforms with our new engine, ​Render Dragon. ​Second, we’re pushing the graphical possibilities of the game by ​partnering with NVIDIA to bring real-time ray tracing to Minecraft. ​Prepare your eyes!

You’ll see individual Minecraft Bedrock platforms update in the months ahead as we learn the capabilities of our lovely new game engine, Render Dragon. You may have already seen a preview of Render Dragon in action if you watched ​Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on-stage when we demoed Minecraft Earth.

It featured edge highlighting and new lighting techniques, which is just the start of the visual and performance upgrades we’re planning to make with Render Dragon. Render Dragon supports a range of graphics features, depending on what your device is capable of. Not all devices will support ray tracing, but we will have some graphics enhancements on most devices. Again, it’s all about taking advantage of different hardware to offer the smoothest Minecraft experience possible, no matter what device you’re playing on!