Crytek has revealed details of its recent demo of real-time ray tracing on the Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card. Recall that in mid-March this year, the developer published a video in which he showed real-time ray tracing in CryEngine 5.5 using an AMD graphics card .
At the time of publishing the video itself, Crytek would not reveal details about the performance level of the Radeon RX Vega 56 in the Neon Noir demo. Now the developers have shared the details: the video card was able to provide an average of 30 FPS in Full HD resolution (1920 Γ 1080 pixels). It was also noted that if the quality / intensity of ray tracing is halved, then the same graphics accelerator is able to provide 40 FPS in QHD resolution (2560 Γ 1440 pixels).
The Neon Noir demo uses ray tracing to build reflections and refractions of light. In fairness, it should be noted that there are really a lot of reflections here, and the Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card was able to cope with them, even without specialized logic for tracing acceleration like RT cores. Recall that at the moment this AMD video card belongs to the solutions of the middle price segment.
The secret to success is simple: the ray tracing in the Crytek demo is based on voxels. This approach requires significantly less processing power than NVIDIA 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, regardless of whether they have specialized logic for such tasks or not.
But still, Crytek notes that specialized RT cores can significantly speed up ray tracing. Moreover, there are no obstacles for their use with Crytek technologies, because GeForce RTX video cards support Microsoft DXR. With proper optimization, these accelerators will be able to provide the highest quality tracing in the Neon Noir demo even at 4K resolution (3840 Γ 2160 pixels). For comparison, the GeForce GTX 1080 has half the performance. It turns out that GeForce RTX does not provide any new features in the CryEngine engine, but provides better performance and detail.
And at the end, Crytek developers noted that modern APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan also provide many advantages for using real-time ray tracing. The thing is that they provide wide low-level access to the hardware, due to which better optimization and utilization of all resources for heavy work with ray tracing is possible.
Source: 3dnews.ru