Crytek has revealed details about its recent real-time ray tracing demonstration using the Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card. Recall that in mid-March this year, the developer released a video showcasing the real-time ray tracing capabilities on the CryEngine 5.5 engine using an AMD graphics card.
At the time of the video publication, Crytek did not disclose details about the performance level of the Radeon RX Vega 56 in the Neon Noir demonstration. Now, however, the developers have shared specifics: the graphics card was able to average 30 FPS at Full HD resolution (1920 × 1080 pixels). It was also noted that if the quality/intensity of ray tracing is halved, the same graphics card can achieve 40 FPS at QHD resolution (2560 × 1440 pixels).
In the Neon Noir demonstration, ray tracing is used for generating reflections and light refractions. To be fair, there are indeed a lot of reflections, and the Radeon RX Vega 56 was able to handle them, even without specialized logic for acceleration like RT cores. It is worth noting that this AMD graphics card is currently positioned in the mid-range price segment.
The secret to success is simple: the ray tracing in Crytek's demonstration is voxel-based. This approach requires significantly less computational power compared to NVIDIA RTX technology. As a result, graphics cards from both high-end and mid-range segments can produce high-quality images using ray tracing, regardless of whether they have specialized logic for such tasks or not.
However, Crytek emphasizes that specialized RT cores can significantly accelerate ray tracing. Moreover, there are no obstacles for their use with Crytek technologies, as GeForce RTX cards support Microsoft DXR. With proper optimization, these accelerators can provide maximum ray tracing quality in the Neon Noir demonstration even at 4K resolution (3840 × 2160 pixels). In comparison, the GeForce GTX 1080 has half the performance. Thus, while GeForce RTX does not offer any new capabilities in the CryEngine, it does provide better performance and detail.
In the end, the developers at Crytek noted that there are many advantages to using real-time ray tracing, thanks to modern APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan. The key is that they provide broad low-level access to the hardware, enabling better optimization and utilization of all resources for heavy ray tracing tasks.
Source: 3dnews.ru
