Video: Crytek CryEngine shows raytracing technology demo (runs on Radeon RX Vega 56)

Game developer Crytek published a video in which it is showing real-time ray tracing reflections, and here is the interesting thing, it's not using Nvidia's RTX GPUs. According to the company, this is possible through a new ray-tracing function of the CryEngine 5.5.

The video they released is called Neon Noir and demos the possibilities of the new CryEngine feature. This video was created with "an advanced version of the CryEngine total illumination function," demonstrating Real-Time Ray Traced Reflections. This functionality will be added to the CryEngine this year for developers to use.

In the video below you can see the scenes rendered on a Vega 56-GPU from AMD. Crytek emphasizes that Neon Noir also did not use screen space reflections. According to Crytek, the raytracing demo from the video is based on an API and is therefore 'hardware independent'.  That means the feature can run on any DX12 graphics card. As to what the added perf cost of doing this through the API is, is not mentioned.

"Neon Noir was developed on a bespoke version of CRYENGINE 5.5., and the experimental ray tracing feature based on CRYENGINE’s Total Illumination used to create the demo is both API and hardware agnostic, enabling ray tracing to run on most mainstream, contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, the future integration of this new CRYENGINE technology will be optimized to benefit from performance enhancements delivered by the latest generation of graphics cards and supported APIs like Vulkan and DX12."