Question about MXAO for Marty....

Hey Marty, is there anyway to lessen the hit that MXAO has on the system? Right now, with everything I'm doing, MXAO alone is taking almost 20+fps hit, and maybe closer to 30 fps in some instances, but I've yet to fully test the upper limit of the hit yet. Are their any tricks or another way to lower a setting to lessen the blow? Something like how in an ENB, you could lower the SourceTexturesScale and SizeScale in AO and significantly lower the impact. Im torn, because I'm sure if people didn't see everything with it on, it would be no big deal, but once you use it, its like OMG I need this, even though its completely subtle, but it completes me.

Can you please your system specs and the configuration you use? Not even on my slow ass laptop MXAO takes so many fps away. Also, what are the fps before MXAO is applied?

Sure.... I have 3930k @ 4.2 GHz, 32GB Ram @ 2166 GHz, 2x980TI OC @ 1350, 1TB SSD. 40" 3820x2160@60 and 34" 3140x1440. Right now I'm playing on the 40" 4k, but have the resolution set to 2560x1440 because @ 4k with mods and reshade, I was getting 24-30 fps, since SSE is only using 1 gfx card. So again, i don't know the total drop, because I've always capped Skyrim @ 60fps because of the physics stuff I've heard about, but I will turn off the framerate limiter tonight and check out the total drop. So with no effects, steady 60 everywhere.

Edit, I uncapped it and ran test. With my preset I am making, I get 73-78 fps without MXAO. With turning it on 48-53 fps..

That is pretty steep to me. This is my first time using AO in reshade, and MXAO in general. I love the look it adds, but it is a pretty big hit to the system. And for me, the numbers are still fine, I was just thinking about others with lesser systems and figured I'd just ask. Can hurt right

Pixel shader performance drop scales linearly with pixel count, 2560x1440 is a huuge ass amount of pixels compared to lower resolutions, 1.7778 times the pixel count of full HD. Hence games with a lot of shaders like Crysis drop fps a lot with increasing resolution while games with only a few shaders only lose a bit of performance. Unfortunately you didn't answer my second question (the config you use) so I can't make a definitive statement.

Sorry, completely missed the second question. For this preset, Im only using DPX, Color Matrix, DOF, HDR, LumaSharpen, Vibrance. For MXAO, my settings are:



I get that 1440p and even 4k are exponentially larger jumps in pixel count, I guess I just wasn't expecting that huge of a jump from MXAO. THis is my first time using it, hence I was wondering if there were settings to lower the quality perhaps, to speed it up, but not so much so that its ugly. Im just on an information gathering expedition with this is all I like learning about all this stuff.

124 samples are WAY too much for gameplay, just because you can raise it to 255 doesn't mean you have to go as high, most shader authors allow value range by what's reasonable but I mostly set their range to the maximum possible without breaking the shader. Set it to 36 (or lower like 24, might still look good on high resolutions like that), blur steps to 3, sample randomization to 0.3 and also for more pronounced AO effect, lower normal bias to 0.2 because I assume your value of 0.8 is adopted from wrong default setting of this UI var which was fixed a while ago.
I have however updated MXAO and will push to github repo though, beta tester report quite raised performance. See my preset on nexus mods for SSE, there is a preview version inside.

I found that 24 samples is enough in many scenarios. 36 is works well. Sometimes I let be on 48. In the upcoming version(the test version from this forum) I found it look better with same sample value. I would say if you include the Indirect lighting then I get a real hit. But if you just use AO it is about the same performance hit as HBAO and in some cases its less demanding.

Over 100 samples it eats about half of my GPU Usage. I have 960, which is a bit outdated. But most of time I have no problems running MXAO with indirect light and ambient light in games and still have a decent framerate as long I sacrifice a couple settings. Both Ambient light and mxao brings so much to the whole game that find it hard to play games without them

Great. Yeah that was the default on there I believe. That's why I came here, I knew you guys would set me straight Now I messaged you on Nexus the other day, I tried the MXAO from your preset, but anytime I enabled it, the entire screen just turned black and i could never figure out the cause of it. I will attempt again and when I get home from work, I will test these new settings. Thanks a bunch guys.

Sunesha wrote: I found that 24 samples is enough in many scenarios. 36 is works well. Sometimes I let be on 48. In the upcoming version(the test version from this forum) I found it look better with same sample value. I would say if you include the Indirect lighting then I get a real hit. But if you just use AO it is about the same performance hit as HBAO and in some cases its less demanding.

Over 100 samples it eats about half of my GPU Usage. I have 960, which is a bit outdated. But most of time I have no problems running MXAO with indirect light and ambient light in games and still have a decent framerate as long I sacrifice a couple settings. Both Ambient light and mxao brings so much to the whole game that find it hard to play games without them

I completely agree with the ability to not use this now that I've tried it. That;s really why I created this thread because after seeing the MXAO, while subtle, I couldn't imagine not having it in my preset because it adds so much to the scene in my opinion.

ibbanez wrote: Great. Yeah that was the default on there I believe. That's why I came here, I knew you guys would set me straight Now I messaged you on Nexus the other day, I tried the MXAO from your preset, but anytime I enabled it, the entire screen just turned black and i could never figure out the cause of it. I will attempt again and when I get home from work, I will test these new settings. Thanks a bunch guys.

It could be that the game lacks a depth buffer. Was the debug mode activated in MXAO?

Though I think get totally white screen when there is no "hook" to the depth buffer in the debug view mode.

However it can maybe be a case of reversed or logometric(LOL, can't remember the right name of it) depth buffer . If you are using Reshade 3,there is in the middle tab something called Pre-Processor settings. Where some depth buffer settings are available. Try them and see if that makes a difference. Though some games just are missing a depth buffer all together and in other cases there is no way to hook it up

I guess I should have specified more. So in my custom preset, I'm using the MXAO that comes with Reshade 3 when it downloads from Github. When Marty released his own preset on Skyrim Special Edition, it said he had a newer version of the MXAO, so I wanted to see it. Now the normal MXAO ran fine for me, but when I tried to include his, I just got a black screen. I had already thought about changing the preprocessor from 0 to 1 and vice versa, but it did nothing. So i've just stuck with the normal one for now, and it works. I just got home, so I will be testing the new settings shortly, just gotta get the kids fed and in the bath, then testing here we go

Well guys that did the trick. I got the fps back down to reasonable numbers, then decided to tweak more, and went a completely different direction ;p .... Now back to more fun Thanks for the help guys.