Marty McFly's Ambient Obscurance (MXAO) with IL

WTF, I haven't done anything that might affect depth precision. What normal bias have you set? It should be at least about 0.1, 0.15 in order to remove false occlusion by data fluctuations. Also, log depth greatly reduces the depth buffer precision so this might be another cause. In my tests with games using log buffer, it doesn't hurt the AO when you disable it.

@Marty McFly
Hmm, I thought I was also having an issue with the culling mask, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Do you know what is causing this?




Sorry for the ass shot, that was the most obvious area because of the black pants. Hopefully you can see the issue.

Basically, it's messing up all the dark areas in the game, creating a lot of banding. I've tried multiple versions of reshade, and of MXAO (even 2.0) and enabling MXAO always causes this issue. The AO debug layer doesn't show any of this, and this issue is everywhere, including flat surfaces.

Any ideas? Thanks a lot for your time and hard work!

Marty McFly wrote: WTF, I haven't done anything that might affect depth precision. What normal bias have you set? It should be at least about 0.1, 0.15 in order to remove false occlusion by data fluctuations. Also, log depth greatly reduces the depth buffer precision so this might be another cause. In my tests with games using log buffer, it doesn't hurt the AO when you disable it.

the normal bias if i manually set to 0.1/0.3 it creates more closer detail , but default low of 0.5 barely hits anything the log setting makes these black lines about a inch wide on a 25" monitor show up in the sky and causes any shading to have what looks like blinds , changing the value from -10,000 or 1/100/10 shows no differences of decease or increase of detail only brought this up cause ive never seen this on any other game before

Is there still no functional Witcher 3 MXAO preset?

MonarchX wrote: Is there still no functional Witcher 3 MXAO preset?

MXAO is working fine for me. Just tried it with a fresh Reshade install of 3.1.1.243.

Hi Marty, I don't know if you can help with this problem. I've never been able to get mxao to look as it should in Mass Effect Andromeda. I've tried ReShades 3.0.6, 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 over the months with various versions of mxao and all suffer from the same thing.



I've got your preprocessor definitions set up as normal, depth buffer is reversed in this game (setting it to logarithmic makes things inordinately worse). Interestingly, IL seems to blend smoothly as it should (as far as I can tell), it's just the AO that has these sharp edges and blocky appearance regardless of the settings.

The other AOs (ssao, hbao etc) in 2.0.3 etc work as intended, and all the other depth buffer effects in 3.x work fine too.

(I'll take a couple of further pictures in debug mode to illustrate it better, but I think you can see what's going on in this picture anyway.)

Yeah, this is some weird issue I have no idea how to workaround without major perf loss.

In older ReShade versions, the backbuffer used to be RGBA8 at all times. Now even on games which I used a long time, it seems to use RGB10A2. That means that the alpha channel can only assume 4 different values, everything in between is rounded. Maybe it's W10 interfering, as I did no have this issue on GTASA + W7, but GTASA + W10 has this (W10 has some HDR support stuff, that might be the cause).
Now why does this affect MXAO in this way? MXAO stores the AO data in the alpha channel during the spatial filter, and that leads to this problem you have, the AO values are "posterized", rounded to 4 different levels. Solving this would require at least 1 additional fullscreen texture, which is a major dent in memory bandwidth I'd very much like to avoid.

Thanks for the quick reply. That's a huge shame, but I can understand why you don't want to add additional overhead to the shader performance. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you make it sound like it could potentially be a problem with more and more games?

I'm on Win7, btw. This game has HDR support but I have all that set to off.

Well, all I know is that I did not have it on GTASA + W7 ever, nor any other game on W7. On W10 I have this on GTASA, Witcher 3 is fine. Some rare times, it isn't the case on GTASA.

To be honest, 'posterized' AO looks pretty nice, cell shaded games could benefit from it.

While that might be true, it's still not what we're after. I'll try to find a workaround. Maybe I can reuse the backbuffer with the normal buffer so it only requires 1 additional texture. Stuff like this happens way too often with MXAO, I keep breaking ReShade or the driver with it.

pastebin.com/x7LSRL8M
Try if that solves it, BUFFER_SHIT is preprocessor variable to enable/disable the "fix". I'd like to know the fps difference with BUFFER_SHIT set to 1 and 0.

That fixed it, fantastic, thank you.

Only tested in one interior location so far. With a 980Ti and i-7 4790 I get 34fps at high mxao settings, 20 radius, 0 normal bias, with both buffer_shit at 0 and 1. No change in fps at all between them (low fps because I have a poop-load of other shaders active too and all game settings on ultra).

I'll do additional fps tests in other locations and report back.

Would be interesting which fps hit you get on a game with a) high base fps and b) low quality settings to have the fps hit from MXAO itself kept low.

Same location, all graphics settings on low or off, all other reshade shaders off, only mxao enabled: 75 fps - no difference between buffer_shit 1 or 0.

MXAO on, BUFFER_SHIT=0 - 75fps
MXAO off, BUFFER_SHIT=0 - 117fps

MXAO on, BUFFER_SHIT=1 - 75fps
MXAO off, BUFFER_SHIT=1 - 117fps

[MXAO settings: quality = ultra; radius = 20; normal bias = 0.45; render = 1; ao amount = 1.16; il amount = 1.6, il sat = 1.2; blending = 0]

I'll do more random tests in various locations of the game over the course of the evening. I'm in a pretty non-intensive area right now which may have an effect, but certainly I've witnessed no automatic drop just by enabling the new definition.

Edit: I just realise you meant MXAO settings kept low - doh. Hang on...

Okay, MXAO settings on Very Low, all radius, AO amount etc with small values: 105fps for buffer_shit both 1 and 0. I'm not seeing any difference at all.

Edit: No difference so far in a couple of other outdoor locations. I don't know how much of a hit you were expecting to see, but with my setup at least I'm not seeing any at all.

hi please help me how to add mxao for reshade 1.1

no

@amoebae: good to know, I hoped that the perf hit would be nonexistant, which it apparently is. I'll make the update public soon.

Thanks so much, Marty. I can think of a good few people who'll be really glad to be able to use mxao in ME:A, and by the sounds of it a few other games that were having similar issues.

Will you update your pdf with the new preprocessor definition? If not I'll just direct people to this part of the thread.

I'll hardcode it (won't keep something named like THAT in the official code ), just added as an easy toggle for you guys to compare. As it yields no fps difference, might as well keep it as standard.

I admit, I was cheekily hoping you'd keep the name of it