Crytek has just released a free ray tracing benchmark based on the ray tracing demo of the same name, which was made available as a video at GDC 2019. As you may have guessed, this tech demo is using CRYENGINE and works on both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards.
PC gamers can download the benchmark from the CRYENGINE Marketplace. This demo will give a score to the user based on how their system performs rendering scenes produced by CRYENGINE’s new ray tracing feature in real-time. Needless to say that we highly recommend downloading this demo.
As the press release reads, the ray tracing technology that features in Neon Noir is both hardware and API agnostic. This is an extension of CRYENGINE’s SVOGI rendering tool that currently Crytek’s games use, including Hunt: Showdown. Developers around the world will be able to use this advanced alternative to other ray tracing methods, which are typically bound to GPU solutions with dedicated RT cores, when the feature ships in the next major CRYENGINE update in 2020.
Crytek plans to optimize this technique, to benefit from performance enhancements, in the future. This tech will support low-level APIs like Vulkan and DX12. Moreover, it will be compatible with all future graphics cards from all manufacturers.
Neon Noir follows the journey of a police drone investigating a crime scene. As a drone descends into the streets of a futuristic city, players will witness accurate reflections in the windows. The drone model also has self-reflecting properties on various surfaces, such as its wings. Further demonstrating how ray tracing can deliver a lifelike environment, the puddles reflect the neon lights below them, street lights flicker on wet surfaces, and windows reflect the scene opposite them accurately. Showcasing the benefits of real-time ray tracing, the demo does not have any screen-space reflections.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates complex lighting behaviors. CRYENGINE’s new ray tracing feature simplifies and automates the rendering and content creation process. As such, the engine can correctly reflect animated objects and changes in lighting. This eliminates the known limitations of pre-baked cube maps and local screen space reflections when creating smooth surfaces like mirrors. This also allows developers to create more realistic and consistent scenes. CRYENGINE’s implementation is a highly customizable and flexible system, which gives designers the control to specify exactly where they want to achieve the highest performance, and where they want the highest quality, to ensure a balanced and optimized scene.
Lastly, here are the PC requirements for running this tech demo.
Recommended Minimum Specs for the Neon Noir Benchmark:
- AMD Ryzen 5 2500X CPU/Core i7-8700
- AMD Vega 56 8 GB VRAM/Nvidia GTX 1070 8 GB VRAM
- 16 GB System Ram
- Win 10 x64
- DX11
Enjoy the following video!
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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