One of the big features of Nvidia's new RTX graphics cards was the introduction of ray tracing, a lighting technique that is typically far too resource intensive to be possible on mainstream graphics cards. Even with the power of Nvidia's bespoke "RT Cores" to help out, the end result is an effect with little benefits and a massive hit on performance. It turns out though, that you don't need all that to get ray tracing to work well. Crytek's latest demo enables ray tracing on AMD's graphics cards and it works just fine.
The Neon Noir demo is a detailed, Cyberpunk-like cityscape with tonnes of lighting sources, reflecting surfaces, and beautiful textures. It looks fantastic whether you run it at 1080P or 4K, which is quite typical of a rendering demo. But it's mostly impressive because the ray tracing it delivers looks just as good as Nvidia's RTX solution, and if it's running effectively on AMD hardware as well as Nvidia's, then it's clearly not as resource intensive.
What's great about Crytek's Ray Tracing solution too, is that it's allegedly hardware and API agnostic. That means this should work on DX11, DX12, Vulkan, OpenGL, and anything else you can throw at it, as per WCCFTech. It's running on mid-range graphics cards too. This demo was able to output at above 30 FPS on a Vega 56 — which is roughly comparable to a GTX 1070. That's old hardware at this point that is far from monstrously powerful.
Crytek's ray tracing solution may offering us a way for everyone to enjoy ray tracing without needing the most powerful hardware in the world.
