At Minecraft Live on March 23, 2025, Mojang unveiled “Vibrant Visuals,” a major graphical overhaul set to reinvigorate the blocky world of Minecraft, just in time for its pitiable live action movie starring Jack Black.
Initially launching for Bedrock Edition with plans for Java Edition to follow, this free update promises directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and shimmering water, visual enhancements that harken back to the canceled “Super Duper Graphics Pack” (SDGP) that was announced back in 2017.
For those unaware, Mojang initially announced the Super Duper Graphics Pack at E3 2017, promising a stunning visual refresh. However, soon after, NVIDIA stepped in with a brand deal that pushed the company towards RTX-powered ray tracing instead.
By 2019, Mojang had scrapped SDGP, claiming they “couldn’t get it to perform well across hardware,” only to announce the following year “Minecraft with RTX”, a feature exclusively available to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX graphics card owners, a narrower pool of consumers than what the SDGP otherwise would’ve demanded.
By bringing realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, Mojang essentially pushed players toward buying pricey RTX hardware, making it seem like ray tracing was the only way to improve the game’s visuals with DLSS upscaling being introduced as a necessary crutch to mitigate the immense performance drop brought upon with ray tracing.
What followed was years of abandonment, with Minecraft with RTX getting no major updates, except for a patch to support the 1.16 Nether Update, which introduced ray-traced effects to the Nether biomes. Even then, full RTX support in the Nether was only available in certain Marketplace maps at the time.
The project slowly faded into the background, with its last update happening around mid-2021, though it wasn’t officially announced. Mojang made small tweaks behind the scenes, like adding a “Ray Tracing Mode” option in the dev branch and adjusting internal RTX settings, showing that some work was still happening.
Even so, Minecraft with RTX has pretty much been stuck in place since 2021, acting more like a marketing piece for NVIDIA’s GPUs than a major improvement to the game, similarly to Cyberpunk 2077 and its “RT Overdrive” mode.
Then, in 2024, as NVIDIA’s sponsorship deal with Mojang quietly came to an end, something interesting happened: Mojang picked up where they left off with the SDGP as a “Deferred Rendering Preview” was added to the Minecraft Bedrock Beta, a rendering system that allowed for enhanced lighting and shadows, without ray tracing or NVIDIA’s proprietary bullshit.
And now, with the official announcement of “Vibrant Visuals,” it’s clear what really happened: Mojang had the capability to deliver these graphical enhancements all along but was stifled by NVIDIA’s business interests. This new update plans to bring back the very same features promised in SDGP, and the fact that it comes so soon after the brand deal’s expiration is no coincidence.
Unlike the RTX experiment, “Vibrant Visuals” will be accessible to a much wider audience, allowing players to toggle the enhancements on or off as they choose. As Mojang Vanilla’s Game Director Agnes Larsson put it, “There’s a lot of testing going on now to try to get it to as many platforms as possible.”
Clearly, ensuring broad compatibility is no longer an issue, despite being the reason Mojang initially gave for canceling SDGP in favor of exclusive GeForce RTX hardware and its then proprietary ray tracing capabilities.
Mojang’s Senior Product Manager Maddie Psenka acknowledged the game’s long and troubled history with graphical updates, stating, “There have been past projects that we’ve had around graphics and wanting to do this kind of update, but I think this time we really wanted to take the space to build the foundations for this new mode.”
The irony is that those “past projects” namely, SDGP were only shelved when NVIDIA stepped in to steer Minecraft’s graphical future toward their own bottom line.
Minecraft started as a passion project by Notch and unexpectedly became a worldwide phenomenon, appealing to players of all ages with its simple yet deep gameplay which promoted creativity. But after Microsoft bought the game in 2014, its direction took a turn for the worst.
The acquisition gave Mojang more resources, which only created a split amongst its fanbase. Minecraft was now divided between Java Edition, the original PC version (Windows, macOS, Linux), and Bedrock Edition, a more optimized C++ version built from the old Pocket Edition (2011) to run smoothly on mobile, consoles, and Windows 10/11.
In 2017, the “Better Together” update brought cross-platform play to Bedrock, but Java remained separate, keeping its unique features but further dividing the player base.
Over time, updates became more controversial, and Minecraft’s relevance started slipping. One of the biggest turning points was the 1.9 Combat Update in 2016, which completely reworked combat. Instead of fast spam-clicking, attacks now had cooldowns, and weapons had unique stats. PvP fans hated the change, while others felt the update, despite adding End Cities and the ability to fly in the form of the Elytra, 1.9 lacked enough content after such a long wait.
Major updates started arriving yearly, but they struggled to balance new ideas with the game’s original charm, and many longtime players drifted away as Minecraft’s core mechanics and defining characteristics continue to be changed.
Minecraft is still a huge game, but it doesn’t dominate gaming culture like it once did. To bring back both old and new players, Mojang is rolling out a big visual upgrade. But will it be enough to reignite the same excitement that made Minecraft a phenomenon? I doubt it.
With NVIDIA no longer steering the ship, Mojang is finally delivering the graphics update players should have had several years ago. But the damage is done, Minecraft fans waited seven years for this, all because of back alley corporate bullshit. NVIDIA didn’t just delay better graphics; it made Minecraft’s existing problems worse.
The Java-Bedrock divide had long since split the player base, and RTX made things worse by locking visual improvements behind Bedrock Edition requiring new and expensive hardware. For years, Mojang focused on NVIDIA’s priorities instead of what the game really needed.
RTX promised cutting-edge visuals but raped performance, leaving many disappointed. Meanwhile, the Super Duper Graphics Pack, a simple, accessible upgrade was abandoned in favor that marketing deal.
The shift from SDGP to Vibrant Visuals makes it clear: NVIDIA’s involvement stalled progress. The RTX experiment hijacked what should have been a universal upgrade, delaying better visuals for years.
Since Microsoft’s acquisition, Minecraft has struggled with community division and controversial updates, but Vibrant Visuals could be a step in the right direction, one free from NVIDIA’s influence. The real question is, how much sooner could this have happened if Mojang hadn’t gone down the RTX path? Either way, they’re trying to get back on track by making Minecraft’s future a lot more bright and shiny thanks to volumetric lighting.
Now, it’s up to the players to decide: is this a fresh start for Minecraft or just a long-overdue fix for NVIDIA’s mistakes? One thing’s for sure, the true Super Duper Graphics Pack will soon be here, and all it took was the end of a brand deal for Mojang to make it happen.
