Discussion CryTek's Ray Traceable engine to run on any contemporary GPU

[Frag Maniac]

A demo video was just released today 3/15/19 on OC3D.net, showing what many of us after Nvidia's RTX stage demo thought would be impossible. The video shows some of the best real time ray tracing reflections ever shown, on a mere AMD Vega 56 no less.

That's right, no special hardware required. There's no indication when CryTek will have this tech finalized in their engine or, better yet, an actual game coded with it, but it's rather exciting to see. Of course one big concern is CryTek's limited success at licensing their engine.

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/so...aced_reflections_in_cryengine_on_rx_vega_56/1

Neon Noir

 

[13thmonkey]

Interesting

 

[laviniuc]

nvidia must be feeling silly right about now

 

[Frag Maniac]

nvidia must be feeling silly right about now.

That remains to be seen. Despite the rather misleading RTX stage demo followed by the hurry up and wait for RT process, CryTek have yet to acknowledge any devs even interested in using this new variant of their engine, let alone actually having a finalized build using this tech.

I can't help but think that the PR disaster of Cevat Yerli not paying his developers whilst driving a very expensive car, may have put a bad taste in the mouth of not just his fanbase, but any developers whom otherwise may have been more interested in buying rights to use his engine.

That said, it very well could be the main reasons CryENGINE is used very little is their licensing fee and the difficulty of learning how to use it properly. Of all the CryEngine games I've seen, only the titles CryTek actually developed seem to really make best use of the engine.

I still feel what's being shown in this video is quite an accomplishment if it really is true real time ray tracing via just a game engine. It could however take CryTek coming out of game development retirement to show what it can do in an actual video game, and I really doubt they could get any capable devs to trust them pay wise.

 

[Math Geek]

not got the time to watch the video right now but does it explain at all how it's done?

i mean nvidia used dedicated resources to do it. if this is using what's available on whatever card is used, what other thing is being downplayed for those resources to go to this feature? seems to me that something has to give in order to dedicate the resources. so this adds great shiny hair or whatever it adds, and gives up what? limbs swaying in trees?

just curious since i know something has to give to make this happen. not much of a gamer so not even sure what awesomeness ray tracing even brings to the game visuals

 

[Frag Maniac]

not got the time to watch the video right now but does it explain at all how it's done?

i mean nvidia used dedicated resources to do it. if this is using what's available on whatever card is used, what other thing is being downplayed for those resources to go to this feature?

Since they say you don't need special hardware in the GPU like RTX uses, the ray tracing would have to be done in the engine, but they also imply it's designed to benefit multi threading APIs like Vulkan and Dx12.

The big question for me is whether the hardware version (RTX) wins over the engine/API version. Normally one would assume the hardware version has the advantage as we've seen with hardware encoding via ShadowPlay, etc, but it's anyone's guess at this point, since even Nvidia has not proven a whole lot on the optimization front with RTX.

For all we know this could be a last ditch effort for CryTek to make it's engine popular with such lackluster interest it's had from developers. If that's the case it could very well be a thing where it won't Ray Trace everything RTX does, but a sort of "At least you can do it on any contemporary GPU" thing.

 

[hannibal]

Spesific hardware should give speed edge, but big the difference would be is interesting. 1660ti vs 2060 would be nice to see in that demo. Wel allready have reasonable good idea what the difference is when not using raytrasing. And the Main architecture is same, so that test should give good idea of where we Are going.