Crytek demos real-time raytracing in CRYENGINE

There has been a lot of talk surrounding real-time raytracing over the last year. Nvidia, Microsoft and AMD all announced plans to begin supporting the technology at GDC 2018. Now this year, Crytek is carving out its own piece of the pie, releasing a real-time raytracing demo for CRYENGINE.

CRYENGINE has always been known for raising the bar graphically. In a future update, CRYENGINE will support its own version of raytracing. You can get an early look at it in action in the video below:

The video shows a cyberpunk style drone flying through a city filled with neon lights. As the drone flies through, you'll want to pay attention to reflections on the drone and how the lighting interacts with it.

These are real-time mesh ray-traced reflections and refractions. The most interesting part here is that the demo is running on an RX Vega 56 graphics card, showing that ray-tracing can be implemented in a vendor-agnostic way, even without fancy RTX hardware.

The Neon Noir demo was developed on an experimental version of CRYENGINE 5.5 and was optimised for DX12 and Vulkan. There is no exact release date for CRYENGINE's raytracing feature just yet but it will be added to the engine's 2019 update roadmap soon.

KitGuru Says: real-time raytracing is coming to CRYENGINE, although it could be a while before we see a full game implement the feature. Still, when that time comes, it will be interesting to compare it to Nvidia RTX and see performance across AMD's own GPUs too.

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