Ambient Occlusion and Its Importance in VR Gaming

cageymaru

cageymaru

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Modern day gaming effects that users notice the most are those that manipulate light sources in a scene. The VR game development house ARVI, developers of VR titles such as The Last Day of Defense and more created a blog post that explains "ambient occlusion" (AO) and tackles its various modern day implementations in gaming. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO), HBAO+, HDAO, VXAO, and others affect the visuals in gaming positively and sometimes negatively. Don't forget to try the sliders at the end of the article to see the before and after effects of various ambient occlusion technologies. They have more blog posts on anti-aliasing and other VR topics.

Many people underestimate the ambient occlusion technology, but in its importance, it stands only behind the effect of global illumination (GI). Global illumination and ambient occlusion are complementary effects; their task is to approximate the effect of real radiosity that occurs in real life in the multiple reflections of light and shading. GI models how light is bounced off of the surface onto another surface, whereas ambient occlusion approximates the shading effect from GI. This article highlights the meaning of ambient occlusion, the main AO algorithms, and their use in virtual reality (VR).
 
YES! This is why I was so blown away by the Nvidia RTX demo clip with all the AO options. It makes the scene far, far more "real." I can't wait to see this properly implemented. It's a large chunk of the uncanny valley of lighting that makes games look "fake".
 
AO really improved older games, when it came out. Too bad tge old version seens to be disabled on new games unless they support it.
 
Solid article, helped clarify some of the finer points and the visuals make it very easy to understand what's happening with AO. It's one of the biggest things I notice console games miss out on, they can only do so much with shader tricks before the lack of subtlety and depth in lighting become apparent. Until we get 3-4 generations on and raytracing becomes practical, by which I mean above 1080p and under $1000, this will be a key place where visuals can continue to improve.
 
I've seen plenty of games though where I'll happily turn off AO since the mode on offer looks so fake. I'd rather have a low number of good looking shadows in a game than lots that don't look good for anything, and put shadows where there shouldn't be any.
 
Ha, this thing never made sense to me. The performance penalty is huge for what usually amounts to nothing more than a blurry dark mess around corners.
 
Yeah, which is why hybrid ray tracing is so freaking awesome for AO... you can actually cast a few rays into those nooks and crannies and accurately calculate realistic AO rather than those "blurry dark messes" around corners and objects that make no sense to look at.
 
As a pc gamer I've always wanted better textures over all other effects, period. People can argue about game art style and design and a million other techniques, but when i see a shitty, blurry texture it makes me mad. How many people here load up a game for the first time, turn all the texture settings to their lowest, and then crank up ambient occlusion to the max? If you said yes, unless you are reviewing the hardware, I have concerns over your eternal soul.
 
We're at a point now where games can easily have texture detail that is way past good enough. it's lighting and shadow realism that is holding back scene quality. In my point of view it's the light and shadow on those texture that is the next step for quality. You need that polygon, with a good texture, WITH perfect light and shadow to get the whole thing right.
 
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