Can it run ray tracing? Check out how CRYENGINE’s new ray tracing technology will run on your rig with our free benchmark software.

We are delighted to share the news that we have released ‘Neon Noir,’ a free ray tracing benchmark based on the ray tracing demo of the same name, which was made available as a video during GDC 2019. The benchmark can be downloaded from the CRYENGINE Marketplace, and it will give you a score based on how your system performs rendering scenes produced by CRYENGINE’s upcoming ray tracing feature in real-time. 

The benchmark will give a score on almost any hardware system configuration, with the power of the system reflected in the benchmark’s performance, as with any benchmark software. However, for the smoothest experience, we recommend the following minimum specifications:

Recommended Minimum Specs for the Neon Noir Benchmark:

• 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

We have also added a configuration setting so you can change the quality of the ray tracing in the benchmark from Very High to Ultra, demonstrating how the new technology can be adapted for different levels of performance by the developer or user. When running on the Ultra setting, ray-traced reflections are rendered at the same resolution as the scene. When running on the Very High setting, we adjust a value called LowSpecMode to reduce the resolution of those reflections for rigs with lower performance, saving rendering costs, while still delivering a beautiful scene.

In the benchmark example, the LowSpecMode value is 0 for the Ultra setting, and the LowSpecMode value is 1 for the Very High setting. A scene rendered at 1920p x 1080px with a LowSpecMode value of 1 will result in ray-traced reflections rendered at a resolution of approximately 1357 x 763px. When the feature ships in CRYENGINE, developers will be able to adjust this value to achieve the level of performance they desire for specific scenes, and/or give control over the performance of ray tracing to users as part of the graphics settings. 

CREYNGINE’s ray tracing technology is both hardware and API agnostic and will run on most mainstream contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, whereas other ray tracing methods are typically bound to GPU solutions with dedicated RT cores. The feature will ship in CRYENGINE in 2020, optimized to take advantage of performance enhancements delivered by the latest generation of graphics cards from all manufacturers and supported APIs like Vulkan and DX12. 

Check out our Road to Ray Tracing developer diary to find out more about how we created this new technology. The video features key members of the team involved in pioneering this feature and reveals the artistic ambition behind Neon Noir and how artists and developers can achieve amazing results by deploying ray tracing on contemporary hardware. 

Neon Noir also comes with a full Razer Chroma RGB integration and will pair nicely with Razer Chroma enabled hardware and peripherals. This Razer Chroma integration will be made available to CRYENGINE developers to add Chroma RGB effects to their games easily in the future.

We look forward to hearing your feedback in the comments, on the forum, and via Facebook and Twitter - we also setup a special forum thread so you can share your benchmark score with others. Don’t forget that you can join the community and our CRYENGINE development team over on our official Discord channel. If you find a bug in the engine, please report it directly on GitHub, which helps us to process the issue quickly and efficiently. 

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