Back at GDC 2019, Crytek surprised the world with a demonstration that showcased real-time raytracing without the need for modern RTX enabled hardware. Today CryTek released that benchmark into the wild. You can learn more about the benchmark here.
CryTek did an in-depth interview describing the process of creating the benchmark available here:
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. 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 benchmark is available on the Crytek Marketplace and requires you to have the CryEngine launcher installed. You can check out the benchmark running on rather antiquated hardware (at a respectable clip!) in the video below. According to the CryEngine Roadmap we should expect to see raytracing support (with or without hardware) in CryEngine 5.7, scheduled for a Spring 2020 release.