Ambient Occlusion

[pollend]

I think at the moment the best ambient occlusion algorithm you can use without going overboard is probably either XeGTAO or HBAO+. From a practical perspective these can easily be tacked on without drastically changing how the engine works. HBAO+ is an easier to implement algorithm.

https://github.com/GameTechDev/XeGTAO
https://developer.nvidia.com/rendering-technologies/horizon-based-ambient-occlusion-plus

[pollend]

[pollend]

[pollend]

[dpogue]

We have to be careful with things like this because it can change the look of content compared to how it was originally intended to be rendered. It would be nice if there were a way for content to opt-in to AO (possibly per-object) and control how the effect is used.

The other thing is that we'd want to keep rendering consistent across all the renderers, so if we wanted to support AO we'd need something that could work in the existing Direct3D 9 pipeline too.

[pollend]

A machine old enough to run D3D9 will struggle with this type of AO. you're suppose to use this with TAA, I had to use a larger kernel size (16x16) to even get something workable. even for medium the output is fairly noisy. its a bit too noisy with a smaller kernel size maybe there is a way to get this to work on lower end hardware. Is there any issue with just support based on the skew so the option can just be disabled for D3D9. Vulkan should doable on all current generation hardware?

This doesn't work for all the scenes in the game. A lot of in game meshes are low poly and don't have any kind of smoothing on normals so you end up with these black edges. They're are no normal so those have to be re-derived from the depth map. not sure if there is a good way to refine this but have a look at the PR #1903

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4or1fDadqk

[Deledrius]

Thanks for that YouTube video. That was an interesting rundown on the various strategies.