Crytek releases “Neon Noir” raytracing benchmark

Game developers, hardware makers, and even gamers are still getting the hang of raytracing. It's a new concept, and we're all still figuring out when and where it makes the best sense to use and how it can improve games. A small but important part of that will be hardware benchmarking. Crytek's newly-released benchmark means to bring some hard numbers to the raytracing question.

Crytek's benchmark, called Neon Noir, is hardware-agnostic. In other words, it's not optimized for RTX. With that said, Crytek says that improvements are coming. The company will eventually support the Vulkan and DirectX 12 APIs in the future but hasn't implemented them just yet. Similarly, the developer says it plans to add support for manufacturer-specific raytracing solutions but notes that the support will be about improving performance, not supporting exclusive features.

Neon Noir should become more interesting as time goes on. API support will be crucial. AMD has yet to reveal its raytracing solution, though we know that both the PlayStation 5 and the next Xbox both support hardware raytracing and use AMD graphics, so there's no question that the company is working on its own solution. Then we'll be able to really put Neon Noir to the test and compare team green and team red one-to-one. In the meantime, Nvidia is should win pretty handily.

More than raytracing

With that said, you don't need an RTX card to check out Crytek's raytracing benchmark. Neon Noir is free right now and can run on medium to high-end gaming PCs. Here are the system requirements via TechPowerUp:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2500X CPU/Intel Core i7-8700
Graphics: AMD Vega 56 8 GB /NVIDIA GTX 1070 8 GB
Memory: 16 GB RAM
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
API: Direct X11

It's a good-looking benchmark, and it'll be interesting to see if it finds a place among benchmarks like Unigine and 3DMark.

The post Crytek releases "Neon Noir" raytracing benchmark appeared first on The Tech Report.