Crytek recently released a video demo that is capable of executing smooth real-time ray-tracing. All without the need of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX or Quadro RTX series graphics cards.
It’s called Neon Noir, and it’s a video tech demo powered by a heavily modified CRYENGINE. The video demo itself is about a minute and 52 seconds in duration, but more importantly, Crytek states its ray-tracing demo was rendered using an AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 GPU.
In conjunction with that point, Crytek also points out that its new CRYENGINE ray-tracing feature is both API and hardware agnostic. As explained by Tom’s Hardware, this form of ray-tracing is designed to leverage the most recent GPUs and the DirectX 12 (DX12) and Vulkan APIs.
Real-time ray-tracing is a feature that is still building up momentum among PC gamers. To be fair, both AMD and NVIDIA’s hardware are able to perform ray-tracing calculations and tweaks, but it’s clear that the latter’s Turing GPU architecture would stand the benefit the most from NVIDIA’s demo.
On another note, and to be fair, Neon Noir isn’t as visually impressive as other hybrid ray-tracing benchmarking software, such as UL’s Port Royal test. That was designed specifically to benchmark graphics cards with ray-tracing capabilities. That said, the video demo is still pretty impressive.
At the moment, there’s no telling if Crytek intends to make Neon Noir a publicly available benchmark just like the UL’s 3DMark or Unigine’s Heaven or Superposition. Guess we’ll just have to wait until this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) kicks off to learn more.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
