‘Neon Noir’ CRYENGINE Hardware/API Agnostic Ray Tracing Demo Tested; Available Publically Later Today

Alessio Palumbo  &  Keith May
Neon Noir

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.

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

ComponentsZ370
CPUIntel Core i9-9900k @ 5GHz
Memory 16GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200
MotherboardEVGA Z370 Classified K
StorageKingston KC2000 1TB NVMe SSD
PSUCooler Master V1200 Platinum
Windows Version1903 with latest security patches

Graphics Cards Tested

GPUArchitectureCore Count
Clock SpeedMemory Capacity
Memory Speed
NVIDIA RTX 2080ti FETuring43521350/163511GB GDDR614Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER FETuring30721650/18158GB GDDR615.5Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER FETuring25601605/17708GB GDDR614Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPERTuring21761470/16508GB GDDR614Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2060 FETuring19041365/1686GB GDDR614Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1080 FEPascal
25601607/17338GB GDDR5X10Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1070 FEPascal
19201506/16838GB GDDR58Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 5700XTNavi25601605/1755/19058GB GDDR614Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 5700Navi 23041465/1625/17258GB GDDR614Gbps
AMD RX Vega 64 Vega 1040961247/15468GB HBM2945Mbps
AMD RX Vega 56Vega 1035841156/14718GB HBM2800Mbs

Drivers Used

Drivers
Radeon Settings 19.11.1
GeForce441.12

1080p Ultra

Neon Noir 1080P Ray Tracing Ultra
AVG FPS
99th Percentile
0
40
80
120
160
200
240
0
40
80
120
160
200
240
RTX 2080Ti
152
114
RTX 2080 SUPER
126
95
RTX 2070 SUPER
110
81
RTX 2060 SUPER
95
70
RTX 2060
81
58
RX 5700XT
81
50
GTX 1080
70
48
RX 5700
68
41
RX Vega 64
58
35
GTX 1070
57
39
RX Vega 56
51
29

1440p Ultra

Neon Noir 1440P Ray Tracing Ultra
AVG FPS
99th Percentile
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
RTX 2080Ti
94
69
RTX 2080 SUPER
77
57
RTX 2070 SUPER
67
48
RTX 2060 SUPER
57
41
RX 5700XT
49
28
RTX 2060
48
34
GTX 1080
41
28
RX 5700
41
23
RX Vega 64
35
19
GTX 1070
33
23
RX Vega 56
31
16
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