Crytek has published a video demonstrating the results of the development of a new version of its own CryEngine game engine. The demo is called Neon Noir, and it shows Total Illumination in action with real-time ray tracing.
A key feature of real-time ray tracing in CryEngine 5.5 is that it does not require specialized RT cores and similar computing units for a video card to work. All ray processing takes place using standard computing units that are available in every video card, both from AMD and NVIDIA. In confirmation of these words, the published video with a demonstration of Neon Noir was created by the Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics accelerator. By the way, ray tracing in CryEngine 5.5 also works with any API, be it DirectX 12 or Vulkan.
The developers do not disclose all the details, but some information is still shared. It is noted that in the demonstration, reflections and refractions of light were visualized using ray tracing, and reflections were built even for those objects that are not in the frame. And the global illumination of the scene was built using the SVOGI system based on voxels. This approach is somewhat reminiscent of the implementation of ray tracing in Battlefield V.
Voxel-based ray tracing requires significantly less processing power than the approach offered by NVIDIA with its RTX technology. Due to this, video cards of not only the upper, but also the middle price segment can build a high-quality image using ray tracing. As you can see, the same Radeon RX Vega 56 provides a very attractive visualization, although it belongs to mid-range graphics cards, and its price is only 300 euros.
Finally, Crytek notes that its experimental ray tracing feature makes it easy to render scenes and animations in real time with proper reflections and light refraction at a high level of detail. Unfortunately, the resolution and frame rate of the published demo are not specified. But it all looks pretty decent.
Source: 3dnews.ru