Wednesday, May 8th 2019
Crytek's Hardware-Agnostic Raytracing Scene Neon Noir Performance Details Revealed
Considering your reaction, you certainly remember Crytek's Neon noir raytracing scene that we shared with you back in march. At the time, the fact that raytracing was running at such mesmerizing levels on AMD hardware was arguably the biggest part of the news piece: AMD's Vega 56 graphics card with no dedicated raytracing hardware, was pushing the raytraced scene in a confident manner. Now, Crytek have shared some details on how exactly Neon noir was rendered.
The AMD Radeon Vega 56 pushed the demo at 1080p/30 FPS, with full-resolution rendering of raytraced effects. Crytek further shared that raytracing can be rendered at half resolution compared to the rest of the scene, and that if they did so on AMD's Vega 56, they could push a 1440p resolution at 40+ FPS. The raytraced path wasn't running on any modern, lower-level API, such as DX12 or Vulkan, but rather, on a custom branch of Crytek's CryEngine, version 5.5.
Crytek said that RTX support will be implemented, which should improve performance on NVIDIA graphics cards, allowing for up to 4K, full-screen resolution rendering and effects. RTX shouldn't allow for more features, but rather, for improved performance and quality level of already-implemented ones. There is some interesting information on Crytek's blog post on their current raytracing implementation, the choice to integrate the technology based on object "glossiness" level rather than a full-blown solution for improved performance, and mixing voxel and raytracing workloads for the best possible optimization. Take a look at the source link.
Source:
Crytek
The AMD Radeon Vega 56 pushed the demo at 1080p/30 FPS, with full-resolution rendering of raytraced effects. Crytek further shared that raytracing can be rendered at half resolution compared to the rest of the scene, and that if they did so on AMD's Vega 56, they could push a 1440p resolution at 40+ FPS. The raytraced path wasn't running on any modern, lower-level API, such as DX12 or Vulkan, but rather, on a custom branch of Crytek's CryEngine, version 5.5.
33 Comments on Crytek's Hardware-Agnostic Raytracing Scene Neon Noir Performance Details Revealed
Neon Noir demo runs at 1080p/30 on Vega 56. 4K was rather widely misreported for some reason - due to Youtube video having 2160p as an option maybe.
In other words there is no magic you need hardware acceleration for raytracing !
You know what else does 1080p/30? GTX1080 in Battlefield V with Ultra DXR reflections.
Graph from Nvidia (taken from TPU's news piece):
"Crytek mentions that they dynamically switched from mesh-tracing to low-cost voxel tracing to allow the non-RTX GPU to deliver a solid 30FPS. It also didn’t implement shadows or AO and used the older SSAO ambient occlusion algorithm for ambient shadowing.
Furthermore, the Crysis developer has also confirmed that in contrast to NVIDIA’s RTX powered titles, the reflections, refractions in the demo were half resolution, thereby explaining the poor quality. "
Im not even sure you can compare it to DXR Low let alone Ultra !
Maybe not in BF V ( haven't looked into it ) but fact is CryTek devs themselves admit that their engine offers less visual quality compared to RTX powered titles so yeah my point still stands you can't really compare the two .... Let's wait and see how RTX cards fair in this demo .Yes but considering the already low graphical quality at 1080p30 reducing even further the quality is the last thing you want to do imo , i mean why do you even raytrace at this point .....
Shocker!!!
The point here is that in order to achieve 1080p30 on a Vega 56 CryTek team is already using lower graphical quality in their demo that what can be observed on most RTX powered games , for instance : '' All the objects in the Neon Noir Demo use low-poly versions of themselves for reflections,” Frölich says. “As a few people have commented, it is noticeable on the bullets'' that's not the case on RTX titles or at least not the case when RTX Ultra is enabled as far as il aware. With this in mind lowering even more the graphical quality of that demo in order to achieve higher framerates/resolution makes not much sense because you are already offering less graphical quality that the reference ( wich is RTX powered games ) at 1080p30 .
Hence why comparing the perf of the Vega 56 on that demo with the perf of Nvidia cards on RTX powered titles at 1080p makes litle sense .
Regardless CryTek team is basicaly confirming that in order to enjoy proper raytracing you need hardware support !