Support NeoGAF

[TronLight]

Can you elaborate on this. You can't interact with most backgrounds anyway?

If you bake something, like AO or indirect lighning, it's going to look awesome in a static scene, but as soon as you start to move things around, it will break the illusion because, since it not in realtime, lightning (or AO, or reflections, or anything) won't change.

Take this The Last of Us screen

There is some nice lighting going on here, but its all baked, hence, everthing is static, and you can't move anything. Take the box on the right. You can see that the part your facing is being lit thanks to a bouncing light (because as far as I can tell, the sun is behind it, so without a bounce it would be completely in shadow), and the lightning is right in this particular situation, but move the box, and place it a few meters back, next to the metal door (Without baking the lightmap again) and the box will still look like as if it's still being lit from the old position.

This applies to everything, take AO, lets say you have a wall, you place a wardrobe next to it, bake the AO, then you move the wardrobe: you're left with a black silhouette (the AO) where the wardrobe was.

This slows down development, but more importantly limits the scene interactivity, because you wouldn't not be able to, say, blow up the wardrobe during gameplay, because you'd be left with the AO on the wall.

So you either don't use any kind of AO on dynamic objects, or you use SSAO/HBAO/HDAO...

 

[Slayer-33]

Subtlety always, always, always makes a difference.

 

[Apophis2036]

I can't tell the difference between any of those screenshots lol...

 

[TronLight]

I can't tell the difference between any of those screenshots lol...

You must be literally blind. :lol

 

[novenD]

Those Battlefield screens in the OP aren't very good, frankly. Here's a better comparison from the Nvidia website:

 

[Ambient80]

Don't call Ambient stupid. D:

 

[2San]

If you bake something, like AO or indirect lighning, it's going to look awesome in a static scene, but as soon as you start to move things around, it will break the illusion because, since it not in realtime, lightning (or AO, or reflections, or anything) won't change.

Take this The Last of Us screen

There is some nice lighting going on here, but its all baked, hence, everthing is static, and you can't move anything. Take the box on the right. You can see that the part your facing is being lit thanks to a bouncing light (because as far as I can tell, the sun is behind it, so without a bounce it would be completely in shadow), and the lightning is right in this particular situation, but move the box, and place it a few meters back, next to the metal door (Without baking the lightmap again) and the box will still look like as if it's still being lit from the old position.

This applies to everything, take AO, lets say you have a wall, you place a wardrobe next to it, bake the AO, then you move the wardrobe: you're left with a black silhouette (the AO) where the wardrobe was.

This slows down development, but more importantly limits the scene interactivity, because you wouldn't not be able to, say, blow up the wardrobe during gameplay, because you'd be left with the AO on the wall.

So you either don't use any kind of AO on dynamic objects, or you use SSAO/HBAO/HDAO...

Thanks for taking the time to write that out.

 

[rashbeep]

Good luck with that. Unless it's a first person view (and from a human's perspective at that), you're not viewing the game world from the eyes of a person but both a metaphorical and literal (well, virtual) camera.

Super Mario 64 is like the only game I can think of in existence that addressed this adequately.

edit: Oh maybe you just left out the word "first." I agree that the effect has no place in those games (but cool effects like brightness adjustment moving from dark to light areas would be appropriate)

LOL my bad I meant to say "in any first person game"

 

[AndyBNV]

The examples used in this threads that show how good AO is, are mostly pointing towards non-interactive objects.

HBAO+ has no issue with moving objects or characters. It's applied to Batman, Kenway, Sam Fisher, moving objects, dynamically created, persistent PhysX debris, and so on and so forth.

 

[Stallion Free]

I guess Ubisoft should have turned off the AO in Watch_Dogs.

 

[ScepticMatt]

it was commented that a couple of PS4 games might not have AO?

That was AF, not AO

 

[Bornstellar]

AO is a great effect when you have the performance for it. However, when I need to increase FPS it's usually the first thing I turn off.

 

[MemoryHumanity]

Erm...the majority of those shots look better with AO turned on.

 

[Scotch]

I love a good thread-backfire.

 

[GuardianE]

0 for 2, OP.

 

[-SD-]

We see everything on TV through a lens. video games are trying to simulate that to make it feel like we are looking at something that could actually be captured on film and thus add realism.

...and that is precisely why it is a stupid idea for games.

I don't mind lens flare/dirt in, for example, Crysis 3 because you're playing a character who sees the world through a helmet's visor. Now, that actually adds realism.

 

[PnCIa]

In some games it looks good, in some games it looks bad.
Older implementations are often incredibly noisy and too dark so i would rather leave it off in such cases because it can wreck the picture with black blobs.
Newer games are pulling it off a lot better though.

 

[riflen]

Has anyone posted links from Andy's Batman: Arkham Origins performance guide? Some nice interactive comparison images there: 1 2 3

 

[hesido]

I guess I'm with the OP here. I can barely tell any worthwhile difference in any of the pictures he posted.

I began to grasp the fact that some people can't tell 60fps from 30fps. I began to grasp the fact that some people are very susceptible to sub-native resolutions (I personally care less about resolution than framerate.) But I can't understand how one could "barely" tell the difference between the shots in the o.post!

You didn't need AO in the old times, almost everything was baked in textures and the graphics fidelity was already low to begin with. As the worlds became more dynamic and bigger, the graphics took a hit in the sense that you could no longer bake in everything in a dynamic world. So you need those extra layers of effects. Unfortunately, once graphics fidelity is past a certain point, those extra touches that make the scene more "realistic" (in the sense that light behaving in ways we come to expect) becomes more subtle, but the whole effect of realism comes from a combination of all those subtle layers, each computationally more costly than the next...

Here's the outstanding implementation of "contact shadows" from characters in the last of us in its subtlest moments, which makes the whole indirectly lit scene. There are places that it's much more visible but I'm loving the subtlety in this one:

Their technique is different from screen space implementations seen in the OP tho, as far as I'm aware.

 

[Mohasus]

You only play games with terrible implementations of SSAO then.

This may be true. I was playing sleeping dogs before SRIV and it looked weird too.

 

[DodgyGeezerFella]

Used to agree, I thought it was useless in BFBC2, and suffered a large performance hit at the time with it, for barely anything noticeable.

Better implementations have come, and now games look flatter without it, so that option stays on. There are some freaking horrific implementations out there though, stupid shit like the first person view model having a black dithered halo around it when next to a wall.

The OP screenshot however shows a good reason for it -

Shit is flat as a pancake without it.

 

[pswii60]

AO adds a lot of depth based on the comparison screens in this thread, no red rings required. And it's even more pronounced in motion.

 

[Black_Stride]

No No No Please
No

There is a lot i can hate on but AO has gone a long way and has added too much to scenes to say its the stupidest......stupidest? Nah
Stupidest technique of all time rather hate on shit like like bloom.

Sorry but AO i love......well done AO im 100% on board.

AO makes even stock materials that much better.

 

[Raonak]

wut. the pic with AO looks substantially better.

 

[Wreck-It Ralph]

I guess I'm the only one, but I agree with the OP. If I can barely notice the effect when looking at two screenshots side by side, as is the case with most of the examples in this thread, it's not worth the performance hit to me.

 

[JordanN]

Woah, how did I miss this thread?

Ambient Occlusion is great. CG movies show how it's done and that's the closest you'll get to photorealism this side of rendering.

 

[adelante]

Here's the outstanding implementation of "contact shadows" from characters in the last of us in its subtlest moments, which makes the whole indirectly lit scene. There are places that it's much more visible but I'm loving the subtlety in this one:

Their technique is different from screen space implementations seen in the OP tho, as far as I'm aware.

Yep, TLOU's implementation works extremely well because the darkness of the shadow takes into account which part of the character's body that is closer to the surface too. Gonna quote my post from an old thread:

I'd love to see developers bringing imperfect shadow map tech (or some variation of it) into PC games, knowing full well that current hardware standards presents such opportunity. Forget SSAO/HBAO when you have indirect shadows as convincing as the ones in TLoU:

 

[plagiarize]

Early implementations could do really weird things (I remember Burnout Paradise putting it around telegraph wires for example... what?) but HBAO+ is legit and makes a substantial improvement to any scene.

I can't wait to upgrade my PC and start enjoying that stuff.

 

[Broank]

I remember before they added it to Minecraft vanilla AO was one of the can't play without mods along with better grass (which I believe they still haven't added). It made a gigantic difference switching it on/off.

 

[Zing]

Based on the screenshots in the OP, I'd demand this graphical effect in all games. Compared to having it enabled, games look like Wolfenstein 3D.

 

[Demon Ice]

Dunno what you're talking about, OP. Well implemented SSAO / HBAO is both noticeable and drastically improves the image. Just look at how unnatural all the geometry looks in the Battlefield shots without AO. The pillars going into the roof, the intersections of wall and floor, etc.

 

[Naminator]

Without AO you'd have none of this shading:



Are you genuinely claiming that the shot on the left looks better in this example? http://international.download.nvidi...lack-flag-ambient-occlusion-comparison-2.html

I love these kinds of examples that Nvidia does!

It's even better than looking at two screenshots.

Just sliding that thing and looking at how the picture changes and in which part makes the differences easily recognizable.

 

[Demon Ice]

Look at the difference in depth proper shadowing provides. You can't tell if the pillars in the top image are contacting the roof, sitting just in front of the roof, or what. It looks like a flat image.

The red circles were not necessary at all, IMO.

 

[Ryudo]

I haven't had much luck with a number of titles since going back to pc gaming lately. Couldn't get any results with Metro 2033, Shift 2, Assetto Corsa, SC:BL, Witcher 2 etc. Very finicky to get working if at all ... even with RadeonPro.

 

[Demon Ice]

Look at all the debris on the floor of the Battlefield shot. Without AO it looks like it's all hovering above the floor. It looks unnatural.


Edit: Every pic in the OP looks substantially better with AO on minus the Skyrim ENB one, which seems like it was intentionally chosen as a scene in which there's very little AO, considering all the DOF that's blurring the walls.