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.

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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

We used the tool that we were given to benchmark the game engine performance across a variety of graphics cards from the Radeon RX Vega 56 to the GeForce RTX 2080Ti to see how it all performed in an engine that is supporting Real-Time Ray Tracing features but not using specific hardware acceleration. I do want to note that this is a very exciting implementation that during my (-Keith) testing I noticed that the reflections had their own motion blur and often were slightly lagging behind the scene, this could just be from an early build and may get better in the future it's bit distracting in the demo and maybe more in an actual game. Either way, I welcome the advancements that Crytek has made here. Now on to the results.

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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

Components Z370 CPU Intel Core i9-9900k @ 5GHz Memory 16GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 Motherboard EVGA Z370 Classified K Storage Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe SSD PSU Cooler Master V1200 Platinum Windows Version 1903 with latest security patches

Graphics Cards Tested

GPU Architecture Core Count

Clock Speed Memory Capacity

Memory Speed NVIDIA RTX 2080ti FE Turing 4352 1350/1635 11GB GDDR6 14Gbps NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER FE Turing 3072 1650/1815 8GB GDDR6 15.5Gbps NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER FE Turing 2560 1605/1770 8GB GDDR6 14Gbps NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER Turing 2176 1470/1650 8GB GDDR6 14Gbps NVIDIA RTX 2060 FE Turing 1904 1365/168 6GB GDDR6 14Gbps NVIDIA GTX 1080 FE Pascal

2560 1607/1733 8GB GDDR5X 10Gbps NVIDIA GTX 1070 FE Pascal

1920 1506/1683 8GB GDDR5 8Gbps AMD Radeon RX 5700XT Navi 2560 1605/1755/1905 8GB GDDR6 14Gbps AMD Radeon RX 5700 Navi 2304 1465/1625/1725 8GB GDDR6 14Gbps AMD RX Vega 64 Vega 10 4096 1247/1546 8GB HBM2 945Mbps AMD RX Vega 56 Vega 10 3584 1156/1471 8GB HBM2 800Mbs

Drivers Used

Drivers Radeon Settings 19.11.1 GeForce 441.12

1080p Ultra

1440p Ultra