Crytek has released a new video demonstrating the results of a CRYENGINE research and development project. Neon Noir shows how real-time mesh ray-traced reflections and refractions can deliver highly realistic visuals for games.
According to the press release, the Neon Noir demo was created with the new advanced version of CRYENGINE’s Total Illumination showcasing real time ray tracing. This feature will be added to CRYENGINE release roadmap in 2019, enabling developers around the world to build more immersive scenes, more easily, with a production-ready version of the feature.
Neon Noir follows the journey of a police drone investigating a crime scene. As the drone descends into the streets of a futuristic city, illuminated by neon lights, we see its reflection accurately displayed in the windows it passes by, or scattered across the shards of a broken mirror while it emits a red and blue lighting routine that will bounce off the different surfaces utilizing CRYENGINE’s advanced Total Illumination feature. Demonstrating further how ray tracing can deliver a lifelike environment, neon lights are reflected in the puddles below them, street lights flicker on wet surfaces, and windows reflect the scene opposite them accurately.
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. To showcase the benefits of real time ray tracing, screen space reflections were not used in this demo.
Enjoy!
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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Oh look, more Ray Tracing Nonsense. Because you know when I’m getting shot at, I really wanna stop & take the time to appreciate nonsensical tech. “Ray tracing, coming to a Tetris near you”…
You have no clue what you’re talking about. But we knew that.
While the insistence on shoving technology that will literally never be viable into gaming graphics is definitely nonsense, Ray Tracing isn’t.
It’s true global illumination. It’s how actual light works. Like I said, the only reason it’s nonsense is because good ray tracing will literally never exist in a video game – it’s not possible.
Well, it’s not possible right now… but who knows maybe 10~15 years from now it will the standard.
You say that but in 15 years textures will be bigger, higher poly counts will be normal, and who knows what other shader effects will exist.
It’s definitely possible. There is literally no reason it’s not possible. It’s difficult sure, but def possible. We already have some heavy optimizations in the form of BVH trees and smarter methods of doing it are still being made.
Raytracing makes a huge difference in image quality and the fact that Crytek got it working on a Vega 56 is very impressive. I look forward to seeing future implementations.
Its been working on AMD Hardware Since March Of 2018. AMD enabled it on a developer level. Its nothing new to see.
Off the mark. Ray traced reflections are actually one of the few graphical innovations that allow new gameplay to emerge. The same thing was true when real-time shadows became possible, I still remember turning those on in Battlefield 2 because they gave you a clear advantage over having them off, even if the framerate dipped by more than 10%.
Imagine a mirror maze. Imagine seeing your opponent in one of those street corner safety mirrors. Imagine authentic rear view mirrors on cars. Imagine holding a mirror around a corner like in the next SWAT / R6 type game. Realistic reflections are vital to enabling new game mechanics.
This is an exceedingly dumb point of view.
This sort of argument can be made for literally any technology that has advanced video game graphics in the past.
Ambient occlusion: “Because you know when I’m getting shot at, I really wanna stop & take the time to appreciate nonsensical tech”
Bloom: “Because you know when I’m getting shot at, I really wanna stop & take the time to appreciate nonsensical tech”
PBR: “Because you know when I’m getting shot at, I really wanna stop & take the time to appreciate nonsensical tech”
Penumbra based Shadows: “Because you know when I’m getting shot at, I really wanna stop & take the time to appreciate nonsensical tech”
…and so on and so forth.
“when I’m getting shot at, I really wanna stop & take the time to appreciate nonsensical tech”
What if the very same “nonsensical tech” helped give you advance warning of an impending threat in a way that pre-baked reflections, shadows and cube maps cannot and consequently saved you from being shot?
Well I’d say sign me up for Ray tracing. I’m not being sarcastic either. You see boys & girls, its all in the marketing and purifying it does what you say it does of course. Everything you just said is how you taeget/market as product. Well done man. Haha, you always were one of the more level headed people on this site. You just beat me at my own game by showing me applicative possibilities. Well Done ?
Imagine the ‘pro gamer’ debate of the near-future, e.g. CS GO regulars one day debating whether the infrequent gameplay benefits of having RT enabled are worth the 1-3ms frame-time penalty, haha.
And it would’ve been your fault brother, cause for all you know they are reading everything we type and they now have a new way to market ray Tracing because of these conversations. I’m 100% gonna blame you dude, Haha. But seriously, i’m all for new tech but not the phony marketing gimmicky stuff, show me applications and benefits and i’ll be on bored, just don’t tact blur on everything and call it a day, cause thats basically what 70% of PC settings have become, BLUR, blur and more freaking blur. I’m highly sensitive to motion blur, so anything that uses blur i turn off immediately.
Whenever i boot up a new game the first thing i turn off is Motion Blur, Anti-aliasing & Depth of Field. Those things are all blur. Depth of field and Motion Blur are the worse, i feel like my eye balls are gonna fall the hell out.
Lol, how on Earth will the poor dears cope with playing CS GO at, say, 600fps as opposed to their typical 800fps!
Yep, the marketing of RT hasn’t been convincing enough for the masses given the ubiquitous comments of it being little more than a gimmick. In fairness, it’s not easy to market such a thing when the price premium is substantial and we’re at a point whereby graphics artists have proved themselves to be highly effective at using traditional techniques, e.g. screen space reflections and cube maps, that they’ve refined over many years.
For instance, the RT video promo showing an interior scene of the train in Metro Exodus raised several questions about RT in gaming. It may have looked more realistic but it also arguably worked to the detriment of the gameplay experience due to how dark it made certain areas of the display. Devs evidently need to give much careful thought and consideration to the use of RT. In games, being more realistic doesn’t necessarily always equate to being better.
I’m excited by the prospect of RT in gaming over the longer term once the technology (both software and hardware) has somewhat matured and devs become more adept in its execution. As things stand as of today, I won’t be rushing to spend the big bucks on a RTX 2080Ti but I may be tempted when RTX 2180Ti arrives.
only demos but no games at all
This Demo was rendered by AMD/ATI RX Vega 56 GPU BTW 😉
Interesting
Ray tracing was always possible on any gpu. Just wonder what the peformance impact is for gpus with non-dedicated hardware vs dedicated hardware will be?
the first farcry
Haha that was a long time ago.
Or an optimized one for that matter. I waited years for Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age to come out and then they did the final reveal where they turned the game into an FPS (Hunt:Showdown) instead of the game that it originally was. And it was then Crytek was dead to me me.
Erm, how is this actually possible?
I thought ray tracing required a huge processing power or specific hardware to accelerate it to be able to be used in real-time. But here we have none. Any more info on this?
Clever engineering.
They’ve just found a way to run similar software on the existing hardware, either by developing faster code, or using the existing hardware in clever ways.
If you look at the history of gaming, dedicated hardware solutions never made it, as developers always found ways of implementing things faster on basic hardware (GPU particles, vs Physx for example).
They may have even found a way to move it to the CPU. Who knows really.
It does. Gaming ray tracing isn’t real raytracing. They’re only using GI to affect certain shaders, with 99% of everything else in the game still being the same crap it’s always been.
If it was real, the framerate wouldn’t be FPS. It would be frames per day.
You’re right. Raytracing is very intense and without specific hardware, it’s very slow.
HOWEVER, this isn’t pure ray tracing. This is CRYENGINE’s built in GI solution (SVOGI, which is what Total Illumination refers to) with ray tracing added to it. The rays it traces are of small count and increase the fidelity of the SVOGI, eliminating the need for environment probes.
Yup. Now with Ray traced reflections!
I want a good game from them! Not a tech demo!
What an objective message! wow..
Not false. It is true.
RT is cool but let´s be honest it´s just for enthusiasts. It doesn´t make THAT much different in the end.
wtf?????are u blind?battlefioeld v has ray tracing and metro and its awesome .night and day difference and it runs good .
night and day difference? no wonder average iq in india is 60.
its lighting technique of cgi .compared to traditional technique its easily night and day difference to me .ray tracing vs rasterization is easily night and day difference to me
awww, please explain more, you sound so smart.
as i said, it looks cool (really cool) but definetly not night and day difference.
BF5 has reflections which actually require ray tracing to look good. that’s the natural place of tracing in real-time graphics. everything else is highly questionable. Metro in particular looks completely unremarkable and improvements to their normal render pipeline would have NO DOUBT yielded similar results with drastically better performance. In most outdoor scenes it’s hard to tell ray tracing is used at all. They essentially saved themselves the effort to precalculate any kind of indirect lighting, artificially gimping the regular version of the game, and the “enhanced” version still barely looks any better. Metro Exodus is a disgrace.
Nope, it’s not even for enthusiast. Its just a “talking point” that Scumvidia tried to use as a “Selling Point”. It is truly pathetic and very Trolly if you ask me.
I wondered when CryEngine was going to make gaming 2007 again. This will be good.
i guess they will boost ray tracing for next gpu genereation dramatically so next can easily handle ray tracing
Looks like nVidia forgot to pay them for claims that only their overpriced RTX cards can handle it. Oops.
cool avatar too lol ;p
The power of German Engineering 😀
Lead programmer is ukrainian working in Germany for turkish owners
So, the demo was rendered on a Vega 56, and not an Nvidia card. I wonder why that was? I’m assuming they’ve come up with a more optimized way to run RT without relying on hardware, which to me is pretty exciting.
Now, it is worth noting it never said any of this was real time, but it did say it runs on card snow. Not sure if it is real time or not…but still. This is the kind of progress we need. Progress that runs on ANY card, not just prohibitively expensive hardware.
AMD cards, on a developer level, have been able to run this Ray tracing nonsense since March of 2018. There is an article on this out there, look it up. Its nothing new, just something for nvidia to finger-pop their hapless fanboys about.
That’s literally not how ray tracing works. Hardware can’t handle ray tracing and never has been able to for 2 decades. Software definitely can’t handle it even half as well.
^someone has been drinking the Nvidia Koolaid.
That’s not how Nvidias Raytracing works, but that’s most certainly not the only form of raytracing around.
Raytracing has ran on standard GPUs for many years now, and is heavily used in movie production, CG, physics, etc. The video in the article above already proves it is possible without Nvidas hardware. The Vega 56 the demo ran on certainly didn’t have specific hardware. So, what is left? Software and general purpose parts already in GPUs.
Nvidia wants you to think otherwise, but that’s just because they want you to spend money on their dedicated hardware.
He’s the first person I’ve ever blocked on here, dude is an utter idiot. I don’t mind back and forths with people but I just can’t stand that guy. I just watch him go from OP to OP and talk pure nonsense. Then I get these alerts of nonsense. He loves to start off with, “you don’t know what you’re talking about”. There was an article in March of 2018 that states what you said pretty much. Ray Tracing have been enabled on AMD GPU’s, ‘on a developer level’, for quite some time now. Some people just doesn’t understand how hardware works.
I’m seeing a lot of others have the same reaction. Ironically, his chosen name has pretty much become the default reaction people are having to him.
But, there are certainly worse on here. He still has hope if he can just learn some of the basics and stop living off of marketing information. It’s O.K. to be wrong. It is not O.K. to be wrong, corrected, and ignore the correct information.
Bingo! You said it so damn well man, “stop living off of marketing information” because that’s exactly what is. Haha, you’re good. ???
I’ve used professional raytracing in rendering for 9 years now. The technology is in no way, form or shape anywhere close to a useable state in gaming and if you actually bothered to look at how they are using raytracing in this limited capacity in modern games, youd realize what I said is 100% accurate.
Even with networked workstation gpus, it takes literally hours to render one frame of a high quality scene unless you’re HEAVILY curating how said light Ray’s interact, what they interact with, etc .
Spare me your stupidity if you think GI was around in games and on GAMING gpus before ue4 and 2015
What I said also has literally nothing to do with Nvidia. I never once said the word Nvidia. Leave your pathetic hipster obligation to root for ibderiot products because of done entirely imagined slight out of the discussion. The hardware that can handle the sheer amount of content in memory at the same time, much less the speed or power to use ray tracing to render 100% of a 3d world using only raytracing doesn’t exist and likely necer will.
As I said, you don’t know what you’re talking about about. I’m talking about the technology. I don’t care about Nvidia or AMD or what they’re convincing stupid gamers of.
I’m not sure why you are so stuck on comparing industrial workloads to gaming…
It’s obviously very different. No one was even discussing that. You’re simply changing the point of discussion, making a new point and claiming that you are right. That’s no how argumentation works.
All gaming effects are heavily scaled back and making the comparison has no merit.
Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
It definitely said it was real time. It’s in the video title. Real time Ray Traced Reflections.
AMD cards, on a developer level, have been able to run this Ray tracing nonsense since March of 2018. There is an article on this out there, look it up. Its nothing new, Ray Tracing is just something for nvidia to finger-pop their hapless fanboys about.
Another boring
uselesshyped article on RT by Dsog. Filling your daily quota it seems ?? No offense, but your obsession with ray tracing never seems to end though….SMHJohnny BOI has Threesomes with his RTX 2080ti & Ray tracing. You should hear them go at it all night, in room plastered with Nexus Nude Mods. Truly Riveting I tell ya ???
LMAO
I just hope that
the next Crysis to not be a woman the main character…Feminists begone.
Haha, this might just be a possibility. Don’t give them any ideas brother.
Women as characters are not bad. It only becomes PC when its portrayed as “all women good all men bad.”
Never said women is bad. Just don’t force it thru for political reasons, Crysis historically was a man in the uniform…
Tomb Raider fan here btw…
Having a woman as a main character, and femniism, are two totally different things. You just sound like a pathetic incel upset that women exist.
Acctually no, having a woman on a new game franchise would be logical, not on Crysis, and since it has been men for 3 iterations if they brought out woman would be clearly a political move. And please just block me, looking thru your comments you seems to have some strange behaviour. Thanks.
Yeah, incel! You sound more pathetic commenting BS on everyones comment like you had no time to lose, you acctually sound very much like an incell have you looked at the mirror? Please just block me…
I wanna too, it! 😛
Ati forever 🙂
Now that is what I call truly innovative software engineering!
While Nvidia tried to BS people into believing that Real-Time Ray Tracing is not possible without dedicated hardware, the engineers at Crytek proved them wrong! Nvidia is always full of lies, just like their GSync which they said was not possible without their GSync certified monitors.
CryEngine never ceases to impress! IMHO, its hands down the most advanced graphics engine out there for more than a decade!
Runs at 5fps in any actual game lol.
I’d prefer if they made their own sequel to Far Cry, Crytek’s only great game.
Don’t turn this into WCCFTech please