HBAO+ Compatibility Flags Thread

Many games use TAA now call of duty has since advanced warfare btw the guy who created smaa works for activision which is why they have a heavily modified version named smaa tx2 filmic(used on all systems but ps3/360). Going to throw another thing out the TAA used in fallout 4 actually works better then TXAA or on its best of days to say the least and in some cases has a 20fps hit on the game btw you do not need a msaa buffer to have TAA work you can supersample the previous frame and split it between another and recombine the effect on a 3rd frame the temporal resolve pass's are what makes this smoothen out and actually work correctly or where all the magic happens fallout 4 seems to be supersampling then applying a post aa on top of it in a final pass which accounts for the massive amount of bluring its so good in motion i would take theirs over any form of TXAA ive seen to date as its all been trash i see massive crawling on gta v most recent game ive played that uses it do you see it in fallout 4 to that degree no, no you dont.

 

It has to be high quality hardware based AA without any compromises.
At the moment the only DX11 AA option which satisfies this is properly implemented TXAA.

The Temporal AA in FO4 is simply lazy post AA.
Better than FXAA, but then again that is no big accomplishment.

 

your dumb

 

I finally tested the HBAO+ for ToZ a little more and I DID run into the depth buffer issue someone else described. Which looks exactly like the same issue other flags have. But they have it constantly rather than under specific conditions.

 

I've heard people say there ARE ghosting problems with FO4's TAA though. The game doesn't have Motion Blur, and someone described it being like MB and when TAA is disabled it goes away. Which sounds exactly like Ghosting/Smearing. But I can't verify it myself. I have no interest in Bethesda games. If someone would do a fast camera panning test with it on and off and show screen shots of that. We could possibly tell whether there really is any reprojection issues. (Move the camera back and forth very fast and take screenshots while you are doing this)


The problem with most TAA techniques is that they value being as fast as possible per frame in milliseconds far more than the quality of the technique.
More often opting to compromise aspects for a wee bit of shavings per frame.
When it's already extremely fast as it is. Even SMAAT2x which barely costs more per frame than FXAA on any decent GPU.

Even UE4's TAA is really fast (Which does use MSAA in some way IIRC), but it is by far one of the worst TAA techniques out there. I've only seen one use of it that I think didn't completely suck. Ethan Carter on UE4. But it still sucked pretty bad for a lot of reasons.


Decent AA means High Quality AA that isn't a simple PPAA cop-out without at least putting in the effort to eliminate the big problems with reprojection or bog standard OGSSAA with a bilinear resolve. (UE4 Resolution scale, Frostbite too I think).
At least to me.

Ethan Carter on UE4 with SMAAT2x+DSR looks fantastic with no reprojection issues. And actually in my subjective comparisons looks essentially on par with using 2xSGSSAA+DSR in the UE3 version.

He's not far off base at all. Hardware based AA is king when done right in terms of Image Quality / Performance ratio in the current world of released games an options available to us.

4-8xSGSSAA will beat standard 16xOGSSAA with a default Box/Linear resolve on it's own any day of the week in IQ/Perf ratio.

16xSSAA with you are taking and rendering everything by a factor of 4(Two axis = 16x larger resolution) and mapping every 16 pixels of the pre-resolve buffer in an Ordered Grid to 1 display pixel. The results depending on the input from the game may not be ideal. Then there is the reconstruction/resampling filter.

SGSSAA takes MSAA's decoupling of Coverage from Visibility and Pixel Shading

and adds to that by playing the pixel shading for the entire scene times the number of sub-samples(Color samples) for every pixel. And in SOME cases where it's pointed in the right direction to fixed precision buffers, it can AA those as well for very small performance cost. Where as even in a 16xSSAA situation, these would remain fixed, issues in tact. It can also apply to fractional buffers as well.
(Recent example is Tales of Zestiria with it's Shadow Maps and Depth of Field)
There are counter examples too though where a fixed low resolution buffer with our limited available tools can't be ironed out. (Bloom in Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon or Bloom in Mighty No.9 for example). And in some cases SGSSAA can make them stand out more.


Performance can be highly variable though depending on the game. Though somehow in modern DX11 games most developers have cut corners to get MSAA alone to work with piss poor results in terms of performance too.
I'm sure they'd mess up SGSSAA as well somehow.

A comparison of performance of the two using an existing game.
Tales of Zestiria - Based on a resolution of 1366x768
16xOGSSAA (Using DSR to get 5404x3072)by itself with HBAO+ = ~65-80% GPU usage
8xSGSSAA+HBAO+ =~20-40% GPU usage

I think we can get PP Hybrid solutions to a lot higher quality if the effort was put in.

We need higher quality PPAA than SMAAT2x without reprojection and smearing issues (With it's own adjustable high frequency attenuation option for those who'd rather have as sharp as possible output) and then combine that with hardware or shader based SSAA with a customizable resolve (By the end user. Like DSR, but allow tweaking of the filter width, which function you use. Gaussian,Lanczos,Point,etc). Using a custom Sub-Sample Grid set up would probably help out a lot too.

MFAA I guess you could call TAA, but not necessarily in the same way as others. MSAA traditionally has a fixed Sub-Sample pattern. MFAA changes this randomly every frame. (Or even in the same frame apparently). And then blends them together. I don't know if it could even be called blending. As it does create a flickering/ish type look in motion.

 

I want to redirect the HBAO+ thread about HBAO+ since there is off topic about AA.

I have not played ToZ, but have you tried lowering the first byte in the AO parameters? I believe it handles (as you said) distance of AO effect. It might help with AO bleeding in depth of field and fog. I'm planning to get HBAO+ in Far Cry 3 (uses HBAO) via the hex edit since it had angle bias issues with some flags.

 

:3eyes:
Post temporal AA methods can be fine in some cases, but it is still a compromise.
Depending on the implementation hardware based AA is typically higher quality.

My point is, that there are too many trade-offs being made today by developers to cater to the "mainstream".
And AA support is really suffering from this.

 

No, what happens is that essentially the game's depth buffer goes wacko and only displays that for 3D rendering while completely messing up the UI of the game.

The strange thing is that it's NOT easily reproduceable so far. It seems to be random. (eg: Go into a house in a town, it will happen. And will stick. Do the same thing after a quick save and reload and it doesn't happen) some flags in the driver do this by default always. 100% of the time.

It looks like
765p http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/4deTalesofZestiria20151.png
4x4 of 768p http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/884TalesofZestiria20151.png
Depth Buffer http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/5a9TalesofZestiria20151.png
UI http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/e64TalesofZestiria20151.png

There are some other bad effects from the insertion too at high resolutions that i'm trying to fix too that might play into it.

 

Think I might've fixed it.
One thing that is interesting. At 5464x3072, HBAO+ adds 30-40% more GPU usage than without. Then again, it's computing full resolution AO with like 36 samples per pixel for a resolution with 16,785,408 pixels

 

Nope, haven't fixed it. More problems. Was a somewhat fix for one issue. But others persist. (Like Virtual Fighter Syndrome). And it really does not like fogging at all.

I will keep trying.

 

You can't spell

 

OK, so I have fixed all but one issue!

It's so strange how I fixed the last one.

The two control bits for Fog Amount and Blur Sharpness actually seem to have their functions tied together. And using the two I could get rid of almost all bleeding when the game is using distance fog! Edit: Turns out the AO Fog Fade Off bit works with these two as well!:stewpid:

Initially when I was getting the strength right as well, it seemed like the Angle Bias and Multiplier were tied together too.
And they are, check this beauty out! AngleBias and Mlt are both set to 1

This is all leading me to believe my definitions are incomplete or partially wrong.

Ohhhhh, if only we had that documentation lol!

 

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/assassins-creed-syndicate-graphics-and-performance-guide

Looks like a new version of HBAO+ is available for developers.

Though very clearly, it's far too strong,and exacerbates aliasing, much like Far Cry 4.

The Train station screen shows in the distance towards the end of the station it seems out of place.

 

Oh, but it does have motion blur. It's in the graphical options and can be seen when turning fast... most of the time. Here's a picture with TAA disabled. But it might be rotational only as in the previous games. I have noticed a few places where TAA loses track of specific objects until something touches them, like this convenient statue that began shimmering intensely around the edges while I was testing. Touching it, however, made it stop shimmering - a physics engine interference?

More related, the AO (apparently Scalable Ambient Obscurance) in F4 has a number of parameters that can be set in the console - the radius, bias, and intensity. But nothing for the actual resolution, so HBAO is still better... even if it flickers.

 

I just want to jump in and say that the temporal solution in fallout 4 does have ghosting. However, it is most severe if you are turning or moving slowly. Not sure what it is called specifically, but w/e algorithm adjusting the effect based on motion is a little off. Honestly though, it looks significantly better on than it does off. The jaggies are unreal when it is off.

Personal opinion, I accept TAA as a good compromise in AA. I don't like a blurry image or the motion blur (which I only accept if it is minimal), but I'll deal with blur if it actually kills off most jaggies in motion at a low performance hit.

To be on topic, I still think fallout 4's in-game AO is a better choice than flickering HBAO+, but it isn't like I decide for everybody. Bethesda games have been about immersion for me, and having flickering graphics is a good way to bring me out.

 

I use the 0x00060000 flag combined with in-game AO and see very minimal flicker on my setup. I also use SweetFX and ENB shaders, so I can't speak about flicker in the vanilla game.

 

Farcry 3 DirectX 11 HBAO+ Flag/Hex

Using the 358.91 drivers I tested and found that using the 0x00090000 flag allows HBAO+ for Far Cry 3 without any AO haloing of transparent textures and objects. Note, you have to disable in-game AO by editing GamerProfile.xml in the documents folder (my games>far cry 3) by settings SSAOLevel=0, then save. Also I tested the AO parameters via hex edit to further refine the HBAO+ to eliminate angle bias AO flickering. I did not have to change the angle bias parameter only the multiplier.

Farcry 3 DirectX 11 HBAO+ Flag/Hex
Flag: 0x00090000 (Devil May Cry 4): FE 31 80 89 73 80 8C 0C 00 00 00 00
Hex Edit: FE 31 80 89 A3 A0 8C 0C 00 00 00 00

Screenshot Comparisions (Optimal,Ultra settings used with 2x MSAA @ 1920x1200 (16:10 AR)):

No AO:




HBAO+ via hex changes, but 0x00090000 might work fine though flickering can occur without hex changes:




In-game HBAO:

 

I don't know what the technical term is, but TAA in FO4 doesn't seem to do anti-aliasing as much as it makes edge detail disappear and blur with the background. For example, power lines, which are essentially very thin, sharp lines, are not really visible anymore when moving. Instead you see quite thick, very blurry lines that are barely visible, where before were thin, sharp lines.

So instead of doing anti-aliasing, the detail is removed so that anti-aliasing is not needed anymore.

However, even though it can look like you smeared vaseline on your monitor, it's still better than FXAA, since TAA completely eliminates shimmering when moving. The shimmering with FXAA is rather extreme; the grass and trees and such almost look like they're jumping around on your screen with FXAA.

 

If you have the godray setting on anything other than ultra or off, that kinda happens. The godrays run at sub-native resolution on settings lower than ultra.

 

Edge detail disappear? That's nonsense! Here's a comparison between having TAA on and off. The only detail I see being removed are illusions produced by aliasing. Perhaps your resolution is the cause, although it seems to hold together fine at 1080p as well.

But this discussion really belongs in the antialiasing thread.