Replace SAO with ASSAO as Godot's new SSAO - #44182

Is it intended that I can see the textures' details on the ASSAO screenshot (even the half-resolution one)? I can't see texture ambient occlusion on the SAO and MSSAO screenshots.

@Calinou yep! ASSAO uses the normal buffer to generate SSAO while our implementation of SAO ignored it and MSSAO couldn't use it.

So what your seeing is not the texture's AO, but a high detail AO generated from normals.

@clayjohn Good to know 🙂 Does this mean AO texture maps are still relevant? What about #43957 ?

@Calinou AO texture maps are much higher quality than SSAO, plus they can be used even when the object doesn't have a normal map. There is no reason not to use both AO maps and SSAO together IMO.

Look OK, I am still in doubt about exporting so many parameters to Environment, but I need to try them for a while to see what is actually important.

Thanks!

Compute shaders again or something backportable to 3.x?

Compute shaders again or something backportable to 3.x?

Indeed, compute shaders are still required for this feature. Sorry 🙁

That said, I think it would be possible to backport the half-resolution setting we had in the old SAO to the 3.2 branch. This should provide significant performance improvements. Right now, in 3.2, SAO is always computed at full resolution.

@Zireael07 @Calinou in theory the original ASSAO could be ported to GLES3 as it's all done in a pixel shader. However, it would require duplicating all the work I just did here.

it would require duplicating all the work I just did here.

I think it would still be worth it to backport, though. IMO, there might be 3.x games that want realistic graphics but cannot move to 4.x for some reasons, and #48503 affects them.

@atirut-w Someone was working on implementing GTAO in 3.x instead: godotengine/godot-proposals#3223