https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-vxao-voxel-ambient-occlusion/ https://developer.nvidia.com/vxao-voxel-ambient-occlusion I only know Rise of the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy XV. Based on the Tomb Raider Nvidia performance guide, VXAO is major improvement even over HBAO+. Sure, VXAO was likely superseded by ray tracing, but it'd be extremely nice to apply compatibility flags in older games which never could have supported RTX.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was supposed to get it too with a patch after release, but that never happened, unfortunately.
I think these nVidia GameWorks effects got left behind because these are proprietary codes, probably unavailable for DX12 (or at least complicated to license from nVidia in a way which is convenient for both parties) or more complicated to implement for DX12. I think GW stuffs used to be precompiled blobs (injectable to the game "as is") for DX11 at first and later made available as source codes but with restricted usage still (customization was not allowed, only review and compilation). I could be wrong though, this is just from memory. And may be it's now also customizable or available for DX12 in source code format, I don't know... But it was generally restrictive and changed over time. For example, I had absolutely no idea RotTR had any of these because I enabled DX12 on the launcher config panel's first tab before continuing to the second tab where these options are located and thus VXAO was already omitted from the Ambient Occlusion drop-down list. I tried de-selecting DX12 and found it today. I would have never knew if I didn't I stumbled upon this topic.