Minecraft RTX beta registrations are now live

As announced by Nvidia earlier this week, the beta program for Minecraft RTX is now live for players running the Windows 10 version of the game. This new version of Minecraft uses real-time ray tracing capabilities found in Nvidia's RTX family of GPUs, bringing realistic lighting effects to the game.

The new version will come with a few creator-built worlds which let you admire the possibilities of what can be done with ray tracing in Minecraft, such as a futuristic neon city. These worlds can be found in the Minecraft Marketplace to try out.

Perhaps even more interesting, players can create their own resource packs in the game, changing the physical properties of materials, such as whether they're metallic, light emissions, and more. Players can make use of transparent materials, emissive surfaces, and realistic shadows to bring worlds to life in a new way.

In order to run this new experience, not only will you need a GPU capable of ray tracing, which is to say you'll need the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or higher, you'll also need an Intel Core i5 or equivalent, and at least 8GB of RAM.

There are some things to note here, though. Once you open a world in the beta, you can't open it again in previous builds of Minecraft, so you may want to keep a backup of your worlds before opening them in the beta. Features like Realms and Partnered Servers are also not available in the beta, and you can only play with people using the same version of the beta.

And finally, as with any beta, it's likely you'll run into some issues while using it, and there's already a list of known issues in the current release. If that doesn't deter you, you can download the Xbox Insider Hub app here to join the beta and get started.