RenderDragon

This feature is exclusive to Bedrock Edition and Minecraft Education.

 

RenderDragon is a rendering engine used in Bedrock Edition^[1] that runs on DirectX (Windows builds),^{[note 1]} OpenGL ES (Android builds), Metal (iOS and iPadOS builds), Vulkan (Nintendo Switch builds), and GNM (PlayStation builds).

Features

RenderDragon features edge highlighting and new lighting techniques as part of the visual and performance upgrades, and ray-tracing support. It supports a range of graphics features, depending on the device's capability.^[3] While RenderDragon has improved performance on some devices, others have experienced degraded performance.^[4]

Ray tracing

RenderDragon supports ray-tracing with any DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.1 compatible graphics cards such as NVIDIA RTX Series or AMD RX 6000 Series or above.^[5] However, the DirectX Raytracing API is not limited to these GPUs as it's been proven that RenderDragon's ray-tracing can be achieved through emulation.^[6]

RenderDragon's ray-tracing feature can also be enabled through software rendering with extremely poor performance. On Windows 10/11, Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) version 1.0.8 added a conformant DXR 1.1 implementation that can be used with RenderDragon.^[7]

While RenderDragon's ray-tracing is only officially a feature on the Windows 10/11 operating systems, it is possible to run ray-tracing on operating systems such as Linux, Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1. This is achieved using VKD3D.^[6][8]

With the release of Vibrant Visuals on Bedrock Edition, no further changes are planned for the legacy ray tracing mode.

Deferred Rendering

RenderDragon supports Deferred Rendering, an experimental graphics mode which can be enabled for Minecraft Preview versions on Windows, Android, iOS, and Xbox. It is used by Vibrant Visuals,^[9] a separate graphics mode which enables directional lightning, pixel-aligned shadows, water caustics, atmospheric features, emissive textures, and various other visual features.

Third-party resource packs that enable Deferred Rendering are currently supported by Minecraft Preview. Any graphics cards that are compatible with Direct3D12 Feature Level 12_1 or above (Windows 10/11), OpenGL ES 3.0 or above (Android), or Metal 2 or above (iOS/iPadOS) are supported.^[10][11]

History

Issues

Issues relating to "Render Dragon" or "RenderDragon" are maintained on the bug tracker. Issues should be reported and viewed there.

Trivia

• According to Helen Zbihlyj, RenderDragon was designed to be usable in Java Edition.^[14] However, according to Felix Jones, there's nothing in it that indicates this.^[15]

Gallery

• 
  An image of the RenderDragon v0.0.2 released on Twitter by Helen Zbihlyj.^[1]
• 
  An image of ambient occlusion with the RenderDragon.
• 
  An image of atmospherics and sunbeam with the RenderDragon.
• 
  Unused loading screen.

References

Notes

Navigation