This is a post in which I sneak in an announcement at Gamescom from Microsoft and NVIDIA under the guise of an engaging post about terminology. I tell you now to avoid any anxiety or stress from surprise, to keep your heart healthy. The announcement is that official ray tracing support is coming to the Windows 10 Bedrock edition of Minecraft. Video here; it’s lovely:

Now the gripping terminology post:

I’ve seen “DirectX Raytracing” and “DXR” used for Microsoft’s DirectX 12 API extension – perfect. My concern with today’s announcement is seeing “DirectX R” and “DirectX R raytracing” getting used as terms. Please don’t.

OK, I feel better now. Go enjoy the video! It’s nice stuff, and I say that as an entirely unbiased source, other than being employed by NVIDIA and loving ray tracing and Minecraft. I particularly enjoy the beams o’ light effects, having played with these long ago.

Minecraft fans: It will work on only the Windows 10 Bedrock Edition, not the Java Edition, so Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders project (which offers some ray tracing, but currently does not use RTX hardware) is unaffected. There are some technical details on Polygon, and at the other end of the spectrum, various musings on Reddit.