RenderDragon

RenderDragon is the rendering engine used in Bedrock Edition^[1], Minecraft Earth and Minecraft Legends^[2] 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).

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.^[4] While RenderDragon has improved performance on some devices, others have experienced degraded performance.^[5]

RenderDragon supports ray-tracing with any DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.1 compatible graphics cards such as NVIDIA RTX Series, Intel Arc A-Series or above, or AMD RX 6000 Series or above.^[6] 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.^[7]

Ray-tracing 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.^[8]

While ray-tracing is 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 with a compatibility software.^[7][9] For Linux systems, it is possible to run Minecraft: Bedrock Edition with ray-tracing capability using a custom Wine compatibility layer, see Tutorial:Playing Minecraft on Linux.

This feature is used for the "Ray Traced" graphics mode, which can be enabled through resource packs, allowing customization of MER textures and volumetric fog. After the release in Bedrock Edition 1.16.200, Minecraft published several free collaborative Marketplace adventure maps with Nvidia. With the release of Vibrant Visuals, no further changes are planned for the ray tracing mode.

RenderDragon supports Deferred Rendering, a shading technique with various customizable lighting effects. It is used by Vibrant Visuals,^[10] a graphics mode which enables directional lightning, pixel-aligned shadows, water caustics, atmospheric features, emissive textures, and various other visual features. 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.^[11][12]

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

• According to Helen Zbihlyj, RenderDragon was designed to be usable in Java Edition.^[15] However, according to Felix Jones, there's nothing in it that indicates this.^[16]

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