Ambient Occlusion & Bounce Lighting

[Filizitas]

Wow this eats alot of FPS and its not even that visible O.o The filter radius is way to big!

[lowenz]

Wow this eats alot of FPS and its not even that visible O.o The filter radius is way to big!

Not so big. You can then adjust intensity and blending

This is only to test FPS tanking (a smash with 64 samples ) and fidelity (it's really really good for a SSAO implementation).

[peter_spy]

The effect is visible, but it's so subtle I wouldn't bother. In a daylight setting, or better-lit environment in general, that would be worth using.

[lowenz]

SSAO intensity x5 (so it's clearly visible, please download the original images)

 

https://postimg.cc/rR1P4PHy

https://postimg.cc/JtMvV1HG

[Springheel]

Looks good to me.

[lowenz]

Less radius (1.0, more detail / less surface coverage), 4x intensity:

 

https://postimg.cc/hQKqhyW9

[HMart]

What I love about AO is that it really grounds objects and if you want to improve FPS's then just disable shadows on small non important objects and they will still look planted in the ground, instead of looking like they are floating. Frictional games used this to great effect on Amnesia and Soma.

 

Also imo this stuff should be implemented internally on the engine and not be applied has a post process, that way the effect could take better advantage of the scene info. Also what you guys think about large scale AO first used in Crysis?

[VanishedOne]

SSAO is in the 2.08 roadmap, actually: http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4972 I've no idea whether STiFU has started work on it, though.

[The Black Arrow]

SSAO is ugly, but it's an option that anybody can toggle so I have no problem with people who want or don't want it.

 

Still, what really bothers me is that SSAO is not a "cure all" for...Light where there shouldn't be, it's a very ugly and always badly calibrated/inaccurate method.

The best thing would be to just make everything have shadow-emitting lighting, a game called "Exanima" has this kind of function, no SSAO is present yet you don't see "overly lit areas".

 

I just hope that with SSAO implemented there can also be MXAO, HDAO and even HBAO.

[lowenz]

The Marty McFly solution is *above* HBAO+ as quality yield.....no "fake" darkening auras around the objects at all, no grain noise patches and perfect temporal stability (no shimmering moving around).

Edited April 24, 2019 by lowenz

[Filizitas]

Stop speaking in these "ultraism" terms.

There are different types of AO. ScreenSpace AO is by design always the lacking one.

AO that uses geometry data without camera perspective is what we would need.
It would be accurate and would not follow a pattern.

Grain is a general issue of filtering, we have that because of Hardware limitations, not because of bad shadercode.
If you want no grain, just push the filter samples up and see your pc slowly dying.

 

A screenspace calculated AO will never ever reach the quality level which a scene based will have.
You can look this technique up in Battlefield 3, it costs alot but looks very good and for most: its not depth dependent.

[STiFU]

Those screenshots are awesome! Thanks for testing it. Can you summarize your experiments with respect to performance impact?

 

SSAO is in the 2.08 roadmap, actually: http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4972 I've no idea whether STiFU has started work on it, though.

Apparently not, and I don't think I am going to get around to it any time soon. Gonna unassign that task from me for now.

[lowenz]

There's the injection cost too.

 

Total performance hit: medium-high.

[lowenz]

Lastest version of MXAO HQ (+Normal Smoothing), lastest version of ReShade from the master tree too

Saint Lucia!

 

AO:

Game (97 FPS):

 

Game+AO (60 FPS):

Edited May 1, 2019 by lowenz

[STiFU]

Wow, 37 fps less. That's quite heavy!!

[peter_spy]

And still almost unnoticeable in TDMs dark setting.

5% performance loss would be acceptable for this effect. I bet a far more crude solution would do just fine.

Edited May 1, 2019 by Judith

[wesp5]

And still almost unnoticeable in TDMs dark setting.

I agree. Maybe you should first fix the white compass bug caused by 2.07 that some of us experience due to the improved soft shadows !

[lowenz]

Wow, 37 fps less. That's quite heavy!!

With 16 samples.

Other 10 FPS less for 64 samples.

[Springheel]

I preferred the previous comparison...in this one I agree I can't see much difference at all.

[HMart]

Amnesia and Soma are pretty dark games and imo SSAO is noticeable on them, plus even tho is still a heavy effect is not so heavy as we see here, perhaps the injection process takes a big toll on the frame?

 

Can you show one with AO on and shadows totally off? Just curious how it looks versus the performance.

Edited May 2, 2019 by HMart

[lowenz]

Of course the injection takes away some frame time, and OpenGL is not the primary target of ReShade (count how much OpenGL games are released today).

[peter_spy]

@lowenz – did you use some special tricks to get correct AO in TDM? I've been using latest version of ReShade, and MXAO effect is totally inverted on my hardware :/

[lowenz]

@lowenz – did you use some special tricks to get correct AO in TDM? I've been using latest version of ReShade, and MXAO effect is totally inverted on my hardware :/

'cause reshade by default uses the inverted depth buffer

 

Simply set it to "0" in the preprocessor section.

Edited May 16, 2019 by lowenz

[peter_spy]

Yup, that worked, thanks With MXAO default quality settings, the fps drop was from 140 to 115 fps on my hardware. Biggest problem so far is the MXAO switching on and off, and TDMs alpha planes used instead of light bloom/postprocessing effects, as AO looks like thick black lines rendered behind it.

[lowenz]

The classic "bleeding" issue.