Crytek shows ray tracing technology for systems without Nvidia’s RTX GPUs

Game developer Crytek has published a rendered video showing real-time ray-tracing reflections, without using Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. According to the company, this is made possible by a new ray tracing function of the CryEngine 5.5.

Crytek has named the video Neon Noir and this is a demonstration of the capabilities of the CryEngine. According to the company, the video was created using “an advanced version of the CryEngine’s total illumination feature,” demonstrating real-time ray tracing. This functionality will be added to the CryEngine in the course of this year for developers to get started with.

All scenes from the video were rendered on a Vega 56 GPU from AMD. This video card does not have specific ray tracing hardware implemented, as is the case with Nvidia’s RTX video cards. Crytek emphasizes that no screen space reflections were used at Neon Noir.

According to Crytek, the experimental ray tracing in the video is based on an API and is therefore “hardware independent.” The developer therefore states that this version of CryEngine 5.5 enables ray tracing ‘on most current mainstream GPUs from AMD and Nvidia’.

The company says it will optimize the future integration of this CryEngine technology to take advantage of performance improvements from the latest generation of graphics cards and supported APIs such as Vulkan and DirectX 12. Crytek does not provide further details about the technology. As a result, it is now unclear, for example, how much graphical computing power is required and how it works exactly.