Minecraft on Xbox Series X/S may finally be getting ray tracing soon

The Xbox Series X and S versions of Minecraft may be getting support for ray tracing soon, according to one journalist who claims to already have it activated.

The Verge’s senior editor Tom Warren tweeted that the latest Preview version of Minecraft (which is only available to Xbox Insider members) adds ray tracing options.

However, this doesn’t appear to be the case for all preview members, suggesting the feature may be slowly rolling out to a subset of users for now.

VGC’s version of Minecraft Preview appears to be an earlier build and doesn’t appear to be updated yet.

Although there’s an option for ray tracing in our build of Minecraft Preview, the option is greyed out and accompanied by a message saying it needs to be running on hardware that officially supports it.

Xbox owners have been waiting some time for ray tracing in Minecraft. Microsoft originally announced in 2019 that it would be bringing ray tracing support to the game, but at the time this was only related to the PC version.

Xbox also posted a blog article two years ago which gave an in-depth look at the tech inside the then-unreleased Xbox Series X. This included a description of ray tracing, with screenshots from Minecraft used as an example to show what the Xbox Series X could do with ray tracing turned on.

There has been no official announcement on when ray tracing will come to Minecraft on Xbox Series X/S, be that the preview or retail builds.