This guide takes you from a downloaded archive to a path-traced world. It is written for players. You do not need development tools, and you do not need to install Java, Fabric, or the RTX Remix runtime yourself.
- Windows 10 or 11, x64 or ARM64.
- Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.1, on a Microsoft account that owns the game.
- A GeForce RTX 30-series or newer GPU with NVIDIA driver 616.92 or newer.
- About 5 GB of free disk space while installing, for the downloaded archive, the game, Java, and the unpacked runtime. About 3 GB stays in use afterwards.
- An internet connection while the installer runs.
- 16 GB of system memory is recommended.
Java 21, Fabric, and the RTX Remix runtime are installed for you.
This is a beta. The mod began as a technology showcase and was tuned against one showcase world, built for this project by BlockWorks, so the places that world visits are where it looks and runs best. It ships with known issues, and there are bugs yet to be found. Two things to know before a long session:
- Other mods. It has had limited testing alongside other mods, and mods that change rendering or chunk loading are likely to conflict with it.
- Scope. It targets Minecraft 1.21.1 only. Blocks, mobs, dimensions, and situations the showcase never reaches have had less care, and some will look wrong or run slowly.
When something breaks, report it; that is how it gets fixed.
Download the installer bundle, rtx-remix-renderer-<version>-installer.zip,
from the
Releases page
and extract it. It holds the mod, the RTX Remix Materials texture pack, the
RTX Remix Showcase World, and the installer that sets them up. The release
also lists the mod, the pack, and the world as separate files, for
installing without the installer.
The installer asks which Minecraft launcher to use, unless it finds Prism and no Microsoft launcher, when it uses Prism without asking. Both work. The difference is where the game lives.
Prism Launcher is a free launcher built for modded Minecraft. The installer
uses your existing Prism, or downloads its own portable copy if you have none,
and creates a separate instance for the mod, so your existing game, worlds, and
settings are untouched. Worlds you create in that instance are separate from
the worlds in your normal launcher. If the installer does not find your Prism,
such as a portable copy, choose Use a Prism I already have and enter the
folder holding prismlauncher.exe; later runs remember it.
The Microsoft launcher is the official launcher you already use. The installer adds a profile to it, and the mod shares the same game folder and the same worlds as your normal play.
Prism is the recommended choice. Either way, you sign in with the same Microsoft account.
- Extract the whole archive to a folder. Running the installer from inside the zip file does not work.
- Double-click
install.bat. Do not right-click and run it as administrator. The installer writes to your own user folders, so it refuses to run as administrator under another account. - The installer opens a menu and preselects the right action for what is already on your machine: Install, Upgrade, or Repair. Press Enter to accept it. Answer the launcher question described above. Upgrade and Repair keep the launcher that already has the mod and do not ask; to use the other launcher, choose Install instead.
- Keep all three items ticked in the list that follows: RTX Remix Renderer,
the mod; RTX Remix Materials, the texture pack the renderer was made with;
and RTX Remix Showcase World, the world it was tuned against. The highlight
starts on Continue: press Enter on it to install the ticked items. Enter on
an item ticks or unticks it instead. The pack goes in turned on, and you
can turn it off later in Options, Resource Packs. With the Microsoft
launcher it is also on when you play without the mod, because both share
one game folder, and the list says so beside it; untick it to leave your
normal game's look alone. The world goes into
saves\NVIDIA RTX Demo. A world already there under that name is kept as it is, and the installer says so. - Open the launcher. A Prism the installer downloaded has no Start menu
entry: run
prismlauncher.exein%LOCALAPPDATA%\RtxRemixMinecraft\PrismLauncher\, the path the installer prints when it finishes. Sign in to your Microsoft account if you have not already. In Prism this is Accounts, then Manage Accounts, then Add Microsoft. - Start the game. In Prism, select the NVIDIA RTX Remix for Minecraft instance and press Launch. In the Microsoft launcher, select the NVIDIA RTX Remix for Minecraft profile and press Play.
- Open Singleplayer and choose NVIDIA RTX Demo, the showcase world.
If you already run a Fabric instance for Minecraft 1.21.1 in a launcher of
your choice, you can install by hand from the separate files on the
Releases page.
The instance needs Java 21, Fabric Loader 0.16.5 or newer, and Fabric API
0.116.10+1.21.1 or newer. The installer bundle holds the same three files,
under mods\, resourcepacks\, and saves\.
- Copy the mod,
rtx-remix-renderer-<version>.jar, into the instance'smods\folder. It carries the runtime and its textures and unpacks them into the game folder on first launch. - Copy RTX Remix Materials,
RTX-Remix-Materials-<version>.zip, into the instance'sresourcepacks\folder without extracting it, start the game, and turn it on in Options, Resource Packs. - Extract RTX Remix Showcase World,
RTX-Remix-Showcase-World-<version>.zip, into the instance'ssaves\folder, so thatsaves\holds theNVIDIA RTX Demofolder. - Optionally give the instance the JVM arguments the installer would set:
a 2 GB heap with G1GC, listed as
RECOMMENDED_JVM_ARGSinpackaging/installer.ps1.
Upgrade, Repair, and Uninstall do not know about a manual install. To update, replace the JAR and the pack. To remove the mod, delete the JAR and the files it unpacked, which packaging/INSTALL.md lists.
The first launch of a new version is slower than usual. The mod unpacks the runtime into the game folder before the game window appears, which can look like the game has frozen, especially on a hard drive. It happens once per version.
Once you are in a world, the renderer compiles shaders and draws nothing until it finishes. A dark, flat, or half-built scene right after is expected. Let it settle before judging the picture.
RTX Remix Materials is the look the renderer was made for. Without it, the baseline PBR textures inside the mod JAR give vanilla's textures simpler materials. Packs you turn on above RTX Remix Materials override it, and every pack overrides the built-in baseline.
Type /rtx status in chat. Check these two lines:
Renderer Initialized: true
SDK Available: true
Both true means the renderer is initialized and the SDK was found. The same
status output reports Enabled (master), which says whether RTX rendering is
enabled. For a direct comparison, press F8 to toggle path tracing, or type
/rtx off, look around, then /rtx on.
The mod's own settings screen is in Options, then RTX Remix Settings.... Its pages cover distance and framerate, sky and clouds, lighting, and materials. The renderer's quality tier lives in Remix's own Graphics Settings menu, which the RTX Remix Graphics Settings button on that screen opens. See Settings for how personal changes and map lighting fit together.
Alt+X opens something different: the RTX Remix runtime's own developer menu, aimed at people tuning the renderer itself. Anything you change there is saved by Remix and overrides the mod's settings until you undo it. The RTX Remix Graphics Settings button opens the runtime's simpler menu the same way. While either is open the game receives no keyboard or mouse input, Escape included; close the menu with its own close button, or press Alt+X again, to carry on playing. The runtime's First Use Guide opens at each launch until you choose Never Show This Again in it. It holds input the same way, so the title screen ignores clicks until you close the guide or press Alt+X.
Path tracing runs entirely on your own machine, and the /rtx commands and
keys change only what you see. The Copper Beacon is a real block, though: to
place one on a server, the server needs the mod installed as well. On a server:
- Zones you define with
/rtx zoneapply to your own client for that session only. In single-player they are saved into the world. - The chunk pacing that keeps single-player frames steady while the world loads applies only to single-player, so frame times on a server can be less even.
- Multiplayer has had less testing than single-player.
The mod itself collects no data. The RTX Remix runtime it carries can send diagnostic data to NVIDIA, and its First Use Guide asks about it with two checkboxes, both on by default:
- Basic session and system information, collected each time RTX Remix launches: the game name, the Remix version, your GPU model and driver, the Windows version, the amount of memory, and session configuration flags.
- Technical crash information, sent when RTX Remix crashes: the same system
information plus the crash type and the GPU's diagnostic state. A crash report
carries a memory snapshot of the crashed process and the runtime's
remix-dxvk.log.
Closing the guide keeps the boxes as they are, so uncheck either one there to turn it off. You can change both at any time in the Permissions tab of the RTX Remix Graphics Settings menu.
Crash data waits under rtx-remix\logs\.sentry-native\ in the game folder
until it is sent, and is deleted after a successful upload. With technical crash
information unchecked, RTX Remix still records a crash there but sends nothing:
the next launch asks whether to send that report, and deletes it if you decline.
NVIDIA uses the data
to find and fix problems and to decide what to work on, under the
NVIDIA Privacy Policy.
The runtime's
crash reporting documentation
has the details.
| Symptom | What to do |
|---|---|
| The scene is dark, flat, or half-built on first entering a world | Wait for shader compilation to settle before judging the picture. |
| The first launch looks frozen before the window appears | The runtime may be unpacking after an install, update, or runtime restore. Hard drives take longer than SSDs. |
| Blocks look flat or plastic, like paper cutouts | Check that RTX Remix Materials is on in Options, Resource Packs; run install.bat again with it ticked to add it. Then disable other resource packs to check whether one overrides its textures or sidecars. |
The game closes during startup, and latest.log says NVIDIA driver is below the minimum supported by RTX Remix; closing Minecraft |
Update your NVIDIA driver from the NVIDIA app or https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/, then relaunch. The mod closes Minecraft when the driver is too old for the runtime. |
/rtx status reports Renderer Initialized: false |
Look for Failed to initialize RTX Remix renderer in logs\latest.log and read the error that follows. If it names a conf file, check that file; an existing file that fails to load is not automatically replaced. Include the logs when reporting the failure. |
| On a laptop: the game runs but looks like ordinary Minecraft, or is extremely slow | The display is being driven by the built-in graphics chip. In Windows Settings, Display, Graphics, add javaw.exe and set it to High performance, then relaunch. |
| Windows SmartScreen warns about the Prism Launcher download | Prism Launcher is open-source and is not signed by Microsoft. Choose More info, then Run anyway. You can also install it yourself from https://prismlauncher.org, start Prism once, then re-run install.bat, which detects it. |
| The installer does not find your Prism Launcher, such as a portable copy | At the launcher question, choose Use a Prism I already have and enter the folder holding prismlauncher.exe. Later runs remember that Prism. |
| Very choppy at a high render distance | Lower Minecraft's render distance, or pick a lower tier in Options, RTX Remix Settings, RTX Remix Graphics Settings. |
| The game will not start at all | Launch the NVIDIA RTX Remix for Minecraft profile rather than a plain Minecraft one, and confirm the launcher is set to Java 21. |
| A crash, a black screen, or wrong rendering with other mods installed | Remove the other mods and try again. Mods that change rendering or chunk loading are the likely conflict. If one mod turns out to be the cause, say which in your report. |
If none of that helps, the log is the next thing to look at. It is at
logs\latest.log inside the game folder:
- Prism, when the installer downloaded a portable copy:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\RtxRemixMinecraft\PrismLauncher\instances\NVIDIA RTX Remix for Minecraft\.minecraft\logs\latest.log - Prism, when you already had it: under your own Prism data folder, usually
%APPDATA%\PrismLauncher\instances\NVIDIA RTX Remix for Minecraft\.minecraft\logs\latest.log, or the same path under the folder of a portable copy - Microsoft launcher:
%APPDATA%\.minecraft\logs\latest.log
Paste either path into the File Explorer address bar to open the folder.
Open an issue on the project's
issue tracker
for anything about the mod: what
is in the world and how it looks, the settings screen, /rtx commands and
keys, lighting profiles, the installer, and crashes. Denoiser, DLSS, or
frame-generation artifacts, Remix's own menus (Alt+X and RTX Remix Graphics
Settings), and anything that also happens in another RTX Remix game belong to
the runtime. Report those on the
RTX Remix tracker,
say you are playing RTX Remix for Minecraft, and give the DXVK_Remix: line
from the top of rtx-remix\logs\remix-dxvk.log as the version. If you are not
sure which it is, report it here and it will be moved.
Rendering problems are hard to act on without specifics, so include all of the following:
| What to include | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| The mod file name | The mods\ folder in the game directory. The name ends in a build stamp, which identifies the exact build. |
| Which launcher you used | Prism or Microsoft. |
| Your GPU and driver version | The NVIDIA app, or nvidia-smi in a Command Prompt. |
| Whether a laptop display is driven by the built-in graphics chip | Windows Settings, Display, Graphics. |
| Your Windows architecture | Run systeminfo | findstr "System Type". It reports x64-based PC or ARM64-based PC. |
| Which resource packs are on | Options, Resource Packs. Material bugs depend on this. |
The output of /rtx status |
Type it in chat and copy the lines. |
latest.log and remix-dxvk.log |
latest.log is at the paths above, and remix-dxvk.log is in rtx-remix\logs\ in the same game folder. Attach the files rather than pasting part of them. |
| For a crash, the crash files | Copy rtx-remix\logs\remix-dxvk.log before you start the game again, because the next launch replaces it. Its Sentry session id line finds the report RTX Remix sent, if crash reporting is on. Then zip whatever the game folder has of crash-reports\, hs_err_pid*.log, and crash\crash_report_*.txt, and attach the zip with the logs. Leave out the .dmp files in crash\. Those from version 0.1.0 can contain your Minecraft sign-in token, and so can full-detail dumps, which are opt-in for testing. |
| A screenshot of the problem | F2 saves one to the screenshots\ folder. |
| For a visual bug, a matching pair | Take the shot, type /rtx off, take a second shot from the same spot, then /rtx on. The pair shows what changed. |
Download the new installer bundle, extract it, and run install.bat again. It
preselects Upgrade, which updates the launcher that already has the mod; choose
Install to use the other launcher. Your worlds, settings, and any lighting
profiles you have edited are kept, profiles you never changed take the new
release's defaults, and profiles added by the new release are placed beside
them. With RTX Remix Materials ticked, an installed copy is replaced with the
release's and stays on or off as you left it. The showcase world is never
replaced, since it may hold your progress: for a fresh copy, rename or delete
saves\NVIDIA RTX Demo and run the installer again with the world ticked.
To restore a shipped profile's default, delete that profile file and relaunch.
Missing shipped files under rtx-remix\ and a missing rtx.conf return on
the next launch even when .rtx-remix-version matches. Edited profiles are
never overwritten. Deleting remix-sdk\ or its
d3d9.dll also triggers recovery on the next launch. Deleting
.rtx-remix-version forces full re-extraction of the runtime and rtx.conf,
but still preserves existing profiles.
Run install.bat and choose Uninstall. It removes the mod files, such as the
mod, Fabric API, the runtime, RTX Remix Materials, and rtx.conf, and then
offers to remove the Java, the Prism portable, and the Prism instance it
installed for you. Basic uninstall leaves your worlds alone, the showcase world
included, along with any lighting profiles you authored under rtx-remix\.
The optional Prism instance or portable cleanup deletes everything inside
those directories, including worlds and authored profiles. The full manual
file list is in packaging/INSTALL.md.
| You want to | Read |
|---|---|
| Configure the renderer | Settings |
| Look up a command, a key, or a mod-added block | In-Game Guide |
| Record and replay a camera flythrough | Camera Paths |
| Give your own map its own lighting | Gameplay-driven profiles |
| Make a texture pack that this renderer understands | Resource Packs |