Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion

SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) is a popular but limited process being used in contemporary games. Ray tracing provides better results. We explain why, and prove it with a set of side-by-side examples.

[@MadMike93]

Awesome technology. Waiting for new generation of GPUs with tensor cores. GTX Titan V is too expensive for me (now I'm using gtx1070).

[@bikedance689]

oh, i think... 1070 is so good already

[@Justin-ym5ce]

One thing I don’t understand is if your suppose to turn Ambient Occlusion too off when the Ray Tracing is enabled or if this automatically happens..

[@DeadPixel1105]

It depends on how the game in question is utilizing ray tracing. "Ray tracing" is an umbrella term. More specifically, there is ray traced reflections, ray traced shadows, ray traced global illumination, and ray traced ambient occlusion. When a game is advertised as having ray tracing, it typically is only using one or two of these ray tracing features. The vast majority of games do not utilize them all, as it would be way too demanding on performance. For example: Doom Eternal uses ray traced reflections. That's it. Nothing else is ray traced. And Dead Space remake uses ray traced ambient occlusion. Nothing else is ray traced. Meanwhile, Portal RTX, Quake II RTX, and the newest updates for Cyberpunk uses full ray/path tracing. It uses ALL ray tracing features. Ideally, and this is the case for all games I know of, turning on ray tracing deactivates the non-ray traced version of that effect. Same for DLSS, which uses it's own built-in antialiasing. Turning on DLSS in a game will automatically de-activate the game's own standard antialiasing and the DLSS-implemented antialiasing overrides it (oftentimes with much greater visual quality). Sorry for the wall of text.

[@syntaxed2]

Anything raytraced is better than the non-raytraced hacks.

[@anniewarbucks1794]

But wouldn't I have to buy an RTX card for this?

[@johntheux9238]

Yes

[@anniewarbucks1794]

@@johntheux9238 As if I'd pay a fortunr for one... Oh, wait.

[@geertvisser6629]

And it costs more than half your fps when rtx is turned on -_-

[@johntheux9238]

+Geert Visser With DLSS on it's the same fps with and without raytracing.

[@SerBallister]

@@geertvisser6629 Did you think raytracing would be faster ?

[@yametekudasai9327]

AO was a huge problem for me for decades ...no clue how to make a game .but bugged the hell outta me I'm smart to realise that without even knowing how it works Lol

[@73atman86]

are these interns?

[@DeadPixel1105]

Sounds good in theory, as this guy demonstrates. But in actual practical application, it's completely pointless. For example, comparing SSAO to RTAO in Dead Space Remake. Literally NO DIFFERENCE at all. Zero. None. Side-by-side comparison screen shots, you can't notice any difference at all.

[@nathanielguggenheim5522]

It's all about selling you the old hardware from 10y ago with some minor updates for double price again.Instead of inventing some really ground breaking or better tools or... you name it.

[@syntaxed2]

LOL DS remake was rather unimpressive - They were still using baked AO and shadowmaps. Theres a big big difference between raytraced AO and SSAO...just go check redshift, arnold, mantra, cycles or any other renderer.

[@Ioganstone]

big fail.. he first compares it to 10 year old technology which has been replaced by HBAO+ and gets rid of the "uniform halo" effect. That was even developed by Nvidia so this is just a cash in. And then, anyone who knows raytracing realizes it does the entire lighting and does Ambient Occlusion as a byproduct of photons bouncing around. So to compare it to techniques that only do Ambient Occlusion is disingenius at best, unless there are games out there that have opt in shadowmaps. But maybe that mealy mouthed PR dude can convince me.