All I wanted to know was whether I should turn on SSAO or not since it was a mysterious setting in graphics in WoW and this is what Wikipedia said about. So. yeah. WTF? please.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_space_ambient_occlusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_space_ambient_occlusion)
In: Technology
TLDR: If it isn’t making the game run slow and it doesn’t make it look weird, you should probably turn it on. It’ll make your game look slightly nicer.
Long Answer: What is ambient light? When light travels through a room, some of the beams of light will bounce many times before they hit your eye, or your camera. Light that bounces around like this is called ambient light. For example, the reason why shadows look slightly blue on a very sunny day is because the shadow is illuminated by the ambient light from the sky.
What is ambient occlusion? However, tight spaces block more ambient light then open spaces. An easy place to see this in real life is too look at the corners in a room. You’ll notice that they are slightly darker then the rest of the room. How much darker, and how wide that dark spot is is going to depend on what kind of lighting the room has, so you’ll notice that is looks different in a room illuminated by a window then one illuminated by a ceiling light.
What is Screen Space Ambient Occlusion? For computer games that aren’t using ray tracing, calculating ambient light correctly is really challenging to compute, so instead the games approximate ambient light by analyzing each pixel in the screen (screen space). This technique is called Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.
Should you use it? In most cases it will make your game look slightly nicer, and also run slightly slower, but most computers today can run ambient occlusion with little difficulty.
In short, ambient occlusion is how light interacts with two surfaces near each other. If you try and simulate it perfectly for every object in a scene then it takes quite a long time, so over the years we’ve developed techniques to fake it, one being SSAO, or Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, which only simulates ambient occlusion on surfaces the camera can see, and a very rough simulation at that. When done poorly it can leave a halo of darkness around objects for example.
SSAO will make shadows look better, and offer more realistic lighting than not having it on.
If you care about that, turn it on; it’s GPU-bound, so it won’t tax your CPU any harder than it already is.
Latest Answers