Crytek makes real-time ray tracing benchmark available to all users
Crytek has released a benchmark with support for real-time ray tracing for all users. The benchmark runs on DirectX 11. To run the demo, at least a Vega 56 or GTX 1070 is recommended. In 2020, Crytek will add ray tracing to the CryEngine.
Users can download the Neon Noir benchmark for free. The CryEngine Launcher must be used for this. Users must also create a Crytek account. The benchmark is a 4.35GB download. Once installed, the demo will take up 5.4GB of storage space. Crytek first showed the demo with real-time ray tracing in March. The demo already stood out, since Nvidia’s RTX GPUs were not used. Instead, the demo ran on a Vega 56 GPU from AMD, which lacks dedicated hardware for ray tracing.
An example from the Neon Noir demo. Image via Crytek
The benchmark is currently running on DirectX 11 and currently does not use video cards with special ray tracing hardware, such as Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. According to Crytek, the demo runs on ‘most mainstream AMD and Nvidia GPUs’, with the developer indicating that the presence of at least a Vega 56 and GTX 1070 is recommended. If users halve the ray tracing resolution, Crytek says the demo can function even more stably, without much loss of quality.
The ray tracing feature will be added to the CryEngine in 2020. The feature will also support DirectX 12 and Vulkan by then and take advantage of “performance improvements that modern video cards bring.” The company previously indicated that ray tracing would be added to the engine at the end of 2019. Presumably, the feature will now be added in version 5.7 of the engine, which will also add full support for DX12 and Vulkan to the CryEngine.
According to Crytek, the demo should sketch a realistic in-game scenario and is therefore not intended as a showcase for ray tracing, the developer reports. The demo was created with an advanced version of the CryEngine’s total illumination function. Total illumination can be seen as a form of ray tracing that was already added to the engine in 2015. The technology was used in games such as Hunt: Showdown and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The feature worked relatively smoothly, but until recently, surfaces that were very reflective and smooth were not well supported. For example, this required developers to use static cube maps and screen space reflections.
Static cube maps do not change during a scene, so reflections from moving objects are not visible as they pass over a cube map. Screen space reflections allow the reflection of pixels that have already been rendered on the screen, but these reflections are lost as soon as the original pixels are out of view. Neon Noir is demonstrating a new update, according to Crytek, that renders reflections in real time with ray tracing. This solves the problems with cube maps and screen space reflections.