![A screenshot of Minecraft running the SEUS PTGI shader pack](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8b802d_e13ba2dd32c0464ea7d98e68f21a97a5~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_551,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/8b802d_e13ba2dd32c0464ea7d98e68f21a97a5~mv2.png)
While this blog post is pretty late to the trend(about more than half a year, I think), I think it's still a good idea to point out the fact that while Minecraft have RTX supports, it is only for the WIndows 10 Edition and not Java.
When Sonic Ether released a variation of his SEUS(Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders) shader pack, SEUS PTGI, it was talked about a lot and was essentially seen as the RTX shader for Minecraft(Java), except it wasn't.
Even though PTGI does indeed use ray-tracing, it is not using the RT cores inside the RTX series of GPU, which is the reason why it does not require an RTX card. In fact, the graphics API that the Java version of Minecraft ran on, OpenGL, does not even support the use of RT cores. The way that PTGI circumvents the limitation of not being able to use hardware ray-tracing was to basically brute-force it's way in and calculate ray-tracing relating stuff all in software. In short term, PTGI uses software-based ray tracing. While this results in a slower and lesser quality GI, it still looks very good. In my opinion, it even looks better than the official RTX version.
And that's it for this blog post! Thanks for reading :)
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