Crytek's Neon Noir demo: ray tracing without RTX analysed

It's been almost a year since games using hardware accelerated ray tracing first arrived in the market, and it's clear that the use of RT technology continues to gain momentum, with hardware support baked into both Sony and Microsoft next-gen consoles. However, the debut of Crytek's Neon Noir demo earlier in the year raised eyebrows - what we were seeing here was software-powered RT, delivered by a Vega 56 and still looking quite performant. We've been testing this demo ahead of its public release and results are intriguing.

To get right to the heart of it, this demo utilises DirectX 11 and requires no specific ray tracing hardware. Rather, this version of ray traced reflections leverages Crytek's mature sparse voxel octree global illumination technology with a new spin, delivering a simplified version of the scene that can generate diffuse lighting, while being traced via a technique known as cone tracing to give glossy reflections. This technique has its limitations though: it has trouble capturing moving/skinned animated objects and the specular reflections it generates are not pixel accurate.

This is where Neon Noir comes in. On top of the information from voxel cone tracing and cubemaps, Neon Noir also injects ray traced specular reflections of geometric on top. This geometric ray tracing handles moving objects like the flying drone in the seen in the demo, allowing for pixel accurate reflections and indeed self reflections.

Read more