My big takeaway from the Minecraft RTX beta? Realistic lighting goes a long way. Everything feels more immersive when light comes from where it should, when shadows respond realistically, and reflections appear as you expect. It's the difference between feeling like you're playing a game, and feeling as if you're entering an actual virtual world.

Unfortunately, ray tracing is still incredibly power hungry, and inaccessible to most gamers. On my test rig, which is powered by a Core i7 8700K CPU and an RTX 2080 Ti, Minecraft slows down to around 53FPS in 1080p when ray tracing is turned on. And the hit is even bigger on the more affordable RTX 2060, which falls to around 30 FPS according to NVIDIA's benchmarks. That's where the company's DLSS technology comes in. It uses AI powered rendering to deliver higher quality results from lower-resolution images. Once I flipped that on, Minecraft jumped to around 93FPS in 1080p on my system. And NVIDIA says it'll give that struggling RTX 2060 GPU a bump to around 53FPS.

Performance is even worse on RTX laptops, which aren't nearly as powerful as their desktop siblings. NVIDIA claims an RTX 2080 Max-Q machine, like Acer's Triton 500, will hit 57 FPS in Minecraft with ray tracing and DLSS enabled. Given that's the company's top of the line mobile GPU, you can expect things to be considerably slower for RTX 2060 and 2070 machines.