One question defines and guides the spirit of this project:

What if ray tracing came with a fully realized default resource pack built specifically for it?

Vanilla RTX is not an official work from Mojang or NVIDIA, but it sets out to be the answer to that question, through a continued effort to give it the care and attention a hypothetical native ray tracing pack would deserve.

The goals are to give each block its own character with ray tracing features, resolve as many compatibility errors as possible, keep the latest additions working with RTX, and ultimately bring a proper art direction to vanilla ray-traced Minecraft.

1. Make sure your system meets the hardware requirements and your graphics drivers are up to date.
2. Install the Vanilla RTX App from the Microsoft Store.
3. In the app, open Get latest RTX packs and install Vanilla RTX (or one of its variants).
4. Click Launch Minecraft RTX.
5. In Minecraft, go to Settings → Global Resources and activate the pack.
6. Join any world, server or realm. Ray tracing is now set up correctly.

Prefer doing it by hand? Every pack can also be downloaded directly.

Vanilla RTX uses 16x heightmaps, which are later converted to a higher resolution (192x) normal map to create an impression of depth on otherwise flat surfaces.

Vanilla RTX Normals uses 16x normal maps instead, which define curvature on surfaces and the direction that light will bounce off each individual pixel, also creating a perception of depth and shape, in a different way! In fewer words, Vanilla RTX Normals provides alternative lighting for surfaces.

Vanilla RTX Opus is the third pack in the family, and it is the child of both Vanilla RTX and Vanilla RTX Normals. In technical terms, it combines the layers from both into one higher resolution pack, featuring more depth and detail than both could do on their own.

The three projects are mutually exclusive, i.e. only one can be activated in-game at a time. Which one looks the best to you, or more faithful to how "Vanilla RTX" should manifest itself, is ultimately up to you.

With Supervanilla RTX, Vanilla RTX Normals also gets Parallax Occlusion Mapping.

Supervanilla RTX is a shader mod for Minecraft RTX: a continuation of Minecraft's RTX graphics mode, completing and expanding the original vision shown off in 2019 demos with tons of new awesome features, with every resolvable issue taken care of.

It's optional. Vanilla RTX works with Minecraft's own ray tracing, but some of its enhancements, like glowing mob eyes, need Supervanilla RTX, and Supervanilla RTX fixes many game bugs that no resource pack can reach.

Install it from Shader Mod Manager in the Vanilla RTX App. It's more demanding than the default ray tracing: see the recommended graphics cards.

Since Minecraft 1.21.60, a bug (MCPE-191513) can leave the ray tracing option greyed out even with capable hardware and Vanilla RTX active.

The simplest, most reliable fix is the Vanilla RTX App's Launch Minecraft RTX button, which sidesteps every settings-related bug.

What's going on: if ray tracing is enabled for the first time while you're already in a world, the entire world turns glossy. The old workaround was enabling it from the main menu, but another bug then made that impossible. The manual path became: turn on in-game graphics mode switching, enable ray tracing, then reload the world. The app does all of that for you.

• Unexpectedly low framerate (MCPE-121850): Minecraft's VSync starves ray tracing performance. The Vanilla RTX App turns it off before launching. Still want VSync? Enable it in your GPU control panel instead; it also has much lower input latency. Also ensure you are not using a render distance higher than 16, officially Mojang suggests 8 chunks, but only past 16 chunks performance will begin to degrade.
• Black game window: leave full-screen (F11), restart the game, and keep playing windowed.
• Dual-GPU laptops: set Minecraft to use the High performance GPU in Windows graphics settings.
• Playing with Supervanilla RTX? It's more demanding than Minecraft's default ray tracing. Check the recommended graphics cards, and if your GPU supports it, turn on Smooth Motion in the NVIDIA App for frame generation.

Vanilla RTX already ships workarounds for almost every resource-related issue. See the enhancements.

Many of the game's own ray tracing bugs can't be fixed by any resource pack. Supervanilla RTX fixes a large number of them, such as blocks flickering when you place or break them, the glitchy block-breaking overlay and the detached player hand.

To check whether a bug is Minecraft's own, try this empty RTX resource pack, which uses the base game's files. If the issue still appears, it's a game bug: report it to Mojang at bugs.mojang.com.

If you think it's related to Vanilla RTX, please open an issue. A full list of past and present Minecraft RTX issues lives in the bug tracker.

This is probably not a good idea. As the name of the pack suggests, Vanilla RTX adds ray tracing support for the vanilla game itself, and resource packs or behavior packs that don't belong to the vanilla game aren't guaranteed to work alongside it, as their creators have to account for ray tracing themselves. That said, you can try different combinations and see what works best for you.

You can use the Vanilla RTX App to tune several key features such as fog, strength of emissive textures, normal map intensity, and more.

For more control, or to create your own ray tracing capable resource pack, start with the official Minecraft RTX documentation (Minecraft.net), and use Texture Set Manager for a quicker start. Making a pack for Supervanilla RTX? Read the creator docs.

Absolutely! Vanilla RTX already serves as the foundation for many other RTX and Vibrant Visuals resource packs.

Use it in projects of any kind: videos, renders, your own resource packs, servers, maps. If you redistribute any of my files, give credit. You may not sell Vanilla RTX; this project and its files must stay freely accessible. Read the full license.

Contact: Discord cubeir · X @cubeOhm

Minecraft: Bedrock Edition's built-in ray tracing graphics mode is often called "Minecraft RTX" by the community. The name stuck because of NVIDIA's involvement in bringing ray tracing to Minecraft, and its exclusivity to RTX 20-series GPUs during the beta.

This website is a hub for my independent projects for Minecraft RTX. It does not represent Mojang, Microsoft or NVIDIA. For official information see minecraft.net.

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