Rendering Overview
From version 1.16.200 onwards, Minecraft: Bedrock Edition uses a cross-platform, proprietary rendering system named RenderDragon, created in collaboration with Nvidia. Under the hood, it is an abstraction over Mojang's closed-source fork of bgfx. When compiling for different platforms, Mojang enables the correct bgfx backends for each. This overview will focus on Windows and the DirectX backends.
Backends
On the Windows build of the game, Mojang includes 3 different rendering backends. Each backend supports different rendering modes within the game, and the highest backend supported by the system's GPU is enabled.
| Rendering modes | Simple | Fancy | Vibrant Visuals | Ray Tracing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DirectX 11 | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| DirectX 12 | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
| DirectX 12 (RTX) | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Other Rendering Abstractions
On top of the base RenderDragon rendering system, Minecraft: Bedrock Edition also implements other rendering abstractions. These can include specialized entity renderers, UI rendering contexts, and tesselators. Depending on your use case, these can be more beneficial than submitting raw DirectX calls to the game. We will attempt to document as many of these as possible in the wiki.