Raytracing minecrafts will make you change your mind. Minecraft is not rendering a single block as a copied polymesh logic. It calculates it as is. If you have 1000 blocks, even within the same entity (grass ID), it will render them each individually. Now imagine lots of chunks and grids with this stupid logic. Yes. It costs more than an optimized commercial engine, which will cost half of the resources you can get, while running minecraft almost equally on visuals (raytraced or "super hardcore realistic" shaders stuff) will cost you even more performance.
Ive seen Raytracing Minecraft and also played a lot Minecraft with shaders and my point stands. Even if you manage to make things look overall better there's still the base problem of the "boxyness" of everything. And Ill give you an example that made me begin realise that.
If you pick a mod like Armorers Workshop that brings a massive grid that allows you to put blocks and make a gigantic version of an armor or body piece, then you save it and load the template it gives you to the wardrobe slots and get a miniature, human sized version of that. For example. You try to make a chestpiece that is essentially a pair of boobs. It doesnt matter how well you try to make it look, it would always look "boxy" or like if you're making the 3D model of a character and instead of having 1k polygons you reduce it to a barely 100. It looks A LOT different, for the worse. And the issue is that because of the very nature of MC you cant rely on tools that make the polygons corners to be "softened" by using things like antialiasing which pretty much all 3D games use for blurring those edges for this very reason, to make them look more natural. Also most 3D games are not bound by the grid of 3D movement that MC has. And this, funny enough, even applies to the very thing that MC is all about, building. Here's why.
Imagine that you want to make a house that instead of looking on its foundation like a square, you want it to have a pentagon shape. You can only get 1 wall properly flat looking but yes or yes the other 4 walls would look like a sawblade, since its pretty much impossible, at least in vanilla to do something as simple as putting a smooth flat looking wall in an angle that is not either aligned to the X or Z coordinates. And for what Ive seen this is something that other sandbox games like Conan Exiles dont seem to have as a yes or yes requirement. At least not that I know.
Sure, Shaders and/or Raytracing as well as Resource Packs and mods might make it look better, but again you still have the style/engine base limitation of the "blockyness" of it. And just so you can see what I mean. There's an alternative that I think is kinda better on this aspect that is Lego Worlds. Yet a bunch of those similar issues still stand on that game. It might look "less blocky" than MC, but it still looks odd sometimes. And thats cause Lego Worlds assets tools is overall waaaaaaaaaay less blocky shaped in general than MCs.
