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Crytek shows ray tracing running on AMD GPU in Neon Noir Cryengine demo

In a new demo, the maker of Cryengine has shown off real-time ray tracing running on non-Nvidia hardware.

Since the reveal of Nvidia's Turing GPU generation last year, much of the green team's pitch for the new RTX cards revolved around their capability to run ray-traced games in real time. Up until that point, the dream of real-time ray tracing was just that; a dream.

Everyone assumed Nvidia will have the tech on lockdown for a while, but the situation is seemingly changing. Crytek, creator of the Cryengine, has debuted a new demo called Neon Noir. In it, the developer shows the latest version of the engine's Total Illumination tool, which is seen producing real-time ray tracing lighting.

The real surprise here is that the demo is running on an AMD Vega 56 GPU. Crytek says this version of ray tracing, using its Total Illumination tech, will be capable of running on "most mainstream, contemporary AMD and Nvidia GPUs." The tool is also API agnostic, with the developer noting that it'll benefit from optimisations in both DirectX 12, and Vulkan.

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This updated version of Total Illumination is coming to Cryengine at some point this year, which means anyone using the engine will be able to utilise it in their games.

There are obviously still plenty of questions about the performance hit on AMD cards - or even non-Turing Nvidia cards, but the tech is very impressive. With GDC coming up, we're bound to hear about similar projects.

The next generation of consoles is also on the horizon. Assuming both platform holders pick AMD hardware this time as well, many developers will be interested in getting ray tracing working on AMD hardware.

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