Today, however, the negative effect on performance is hardly noticeable due to the advanced GPU architectures used in modern graphics cards. Should You Use Ambient Occlusion?īack when it was introduced in 2007 with Crysis, SSAO was a bit too much to handle for a lot of GPUs of that time.
![ssao on vs off ssao on vs off](https://i.imgur.com/5OmSqCs.png)
#Ssao on vs off full
However, it is a bit more demanding by today’s standards, and only high-end GPUs can take full advantage of it.
![ssao on vs off ssao on vs off](https://www.gamemonday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/genome-01.png)
However, they are not as commonly implemented in games as SSAO is.Īnd lastly, there is also the recently introduced VXAO (voxel ambient occlusion), which was also developed by Nvidia as a successor to HBAO. These two types of AO are fairly similar, both offer higher-quality ambient occlusion, but with a higher performance hit. These two technologies belong to Nvidia and AMD, respectively, and thus perform better on their own graphics cards. It is the least demanding out of all kinds of ambient occlusion, although the actual quality of the effect can vary greatly from game to game based on how well the developers implemented it.Īpart from SSAO, there are also HBAO (horizon-based ambient occlusion) and HDAO (high-definition ambient occlusion).
![ssao on vs off ssao on vs off](https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2015/game-bench/witcher-textures/witcher-ao-onoff.jpg)
The most common type of ambient occlusion is SSAO or screen-space ambient occlusion. As mentioned above, ambient occlusion ensures more realistic ambient lighting by calculating just how bright certain parts of the screen should be based on geometry.īasically, it determines how much light should be “blocked” by a certain part of the environment.