Neon Noir, the CRYENGINE based hardware and API agnostic ray tracing demo first showcased by Crytek at this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC), is being released publically for download later today on the Marketplace.

　　Thanks to Crytek, we were able to access it in advance for testing. In the video below you can watch Keith's recording of the benchmark run on a system featuring AMD's RX 5700XT.

　　Interestingly, this is the second hardware-agnostic ray tracing demo released in the last few weeks, after Wargaming published the enCore RT demo (made in partnership with Intel). Clearly there's an interest to make ray tracing available to a wider public, despite NVIDIA having hardware support on the RTX cards and AMD reportedly also being on the verge of releasing Navi GPUs featuring hardware support of ray tracing.

　　CRYENGINE developers are getting the ray tracing feature at some point next year, presumably with the 5.7 engine update that is also due to add DirectX 12 and Vulkan support. The folks at Crytek also shared a new 'Making Of' developer diary, detailing how this raytracing demo came to be - check it out below.

　　Neon Noir is a case study for Crytek’s hardware and API agnostic ray tracing feature, which has been turned into a benchmark. Our mesh-based ray tracing is an extension of our prized SVOGI technology and will ship in our proprietary game engine, CRYENGINE, which is renowned for its rendering features, in 2020.

　　Moving forward, Crytek will bring this technology to their games while simultaneously allowing third- party developers to work with this alternative to other ray tracing methods that are bound to GPU solutions with dedicated RT cores.

　　WHAT IS THE ‘NEON NOIR RAY TRACING BENCHMARK’?

　　Neon Noir is an executable benchmark having the scope of the ray tracing demo of the same name that was released as a video at GDC 2019. Run the benchmark on your home system to receive a score for your current rig and see how well it performs when our ray tracing feature is rendered on it in real-time.

　　Neon Noir also comes with full Razer Chroma RGB integration and will pair nicely with Razer Chroma enabled hardware and peripherals. NOTE: You need Razer Synapse to enable these effects. This Razer Chroma RGB integration will be made available to CRYENGINE developers to add Chroma effects to their games easily in the near future.

　　MINIMUM RECOMMENDED SPECS

　　AMD Ryzen 5 2500X CPU/Core i7-8700

　　AMD Vega 56 8 GB VRAM/Nvidia GTX 1070 8 GB VRAM

　　16 GB System Ram

　　Win 10 x64

　　DX11

Neon Noir Benchmarked - Testing Methodology

　　Once we had the results from 3 runs, after discarding an initial burner run for loading purposes, we took the average of average frame rates as well as the 99th percentile results from the run. We report our performance metrics as average frames per second and have moved away from the 1% and .1% reporting and are now using the 99th percentile. For those uncertain of what the 99th percentile is, representing is easily explained as showing only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.

Test System