Back in March 2019, we informed about a new real-time ray tracing CRYENGINE demo, called Neon Noir. This ray tracing tech demo was running on an AMD Radeon Vega 56, and yesterday Crytek revealed some additional details about it.
According to the team, this tech demo runs at 1080p with 30 fps on that particular AMD graphics card with reflections and refractions being calculated at full screen resolution. At half screen resolution, Crytek is able to run this tech demo at 1440p with 40+ fps.
These CRYENGINE real-time ray tracing effects do not currently benefit from any additional performance that modern APIs like Vulkan or DX12 or dedicated hardware. However, the team aims to add support for RTX in the near future. The benefits of RTX will be higher performance and the presence of more dynamic elements in the scene.
“RTX will allow the effects to run at a higher resolution. At the moment on GTX 1080, we usually compute reflections and refractions at half-screen resolution. RTX will probably allow full-screen 4k resolution. It will also help us to have more dynamic elements in the scene, whereas currently, we have some limitations. Broadly speaking, RTX will not allow new features in CRYENGINE, but it will enable better performance and more details.”
In case you weren’t aware of, Neon Noir was developed on a bespoke version of CRYENGINE 5.5., and the experimental ray tracing feature based on CRYENGINE’s Total Illumination used to create the demo is both API and hardware agnostic, enabling ray tracing to run on most mainstream, contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, the future integration of this new CRYENGINE technology will be optimized to benefit from performance enhancements delivered by the latest generation of graphics cards and supported APIs like Vulkan and DX12.
The experimental ray tracing feature simplifies and automates the rendering and content creation process to ensure that animated objects and changes in lighting are correctly reflected with a high level of detail in real-time. This eliminates the known limitation of pre-baked cube maps and local screen space reflections when creating smooth surfaces like mirrors, and allows developers to create more realistic, consistent scenes.
It will be interesting to see which CRYENGINE-powered game will be the first one supporting these real-time ray tracing effects!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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