Marty McFly's Ambient Obscurance (MXAO) with IL

I'm not dumbing down the shader at all.

Smooth normals is still there, it's just toggled per preprocessor now.
Same goes for every other feature, GI options don't show up if GI is disabled (GI toggle is now also preprocessor).
Temporarily, I had temporal supersampling and a culling mask in place but both features didn't work out.

The reason why SSIL and smooth normals moved to preprocessor is that for some reason, smooth normals code was still executed (even though I used [branch] and all) if it was disabled and GI branch caused crashes on some Nvidia drivers, took me ages to figure that out.

The only stuff I removed was user control over samples (because I kept seeing configs with 150 samples and ppl complaining about perf) and the blur radius because my new sampling must use fixed size blur.

As v00d00m4n said, the last update sucked. It is totally unusable now!

Then don't use it. That being said, you managed to ignore everything I said in my reply.

Some people are really ungrateful aren't they?

Thank you Marty for your amazing work. None of us would have the awesomeness of MXAO in our games without you!

Martigen wrote: Some people are really ungrateful aren't they?

Thank you Marty for your amazing work. None of us would have the awesomeness of MXAO in our games without you!

Especially when it's just false. I welcome problems with suggestions or bug reports when they are valid, but this is just downright false. To date, I removed 2-3 options from MXAO (namely blur width, dither size and TSS), all of them had valid reasons to go and none of them downgrade the shader in any way.

Dude, it seems to me that you've invented best AO solution out there, both in therms of quality and speed. Well done, my applauds to you!

Well, I actually liked TSS, but I'm okay-ish with the current blur.

But sadly I came here to say that NVIDIA driver crashes are still happening on the latest version.

On BeamNG, if I enable MXAO and the camera clips foliage, the driver crashes. This did not happen with an older version of MXAO.
Well, by crash, it's more like it freezes for a very short moment, and if it's any longer, the driver crashes.

@ShoterXX: Could this be related to Windows TDRdelay? Does setting it to e.g. 10 sec help?

Shady wrote: @ShoterXX: Could this be related to Windows TDRdelay? Does setting it to e.g. 10 sec help?

Nah, TdrDelay is at 8, this doesn't even take the default 2 seconds.

Omg, how to enable GI ? What should i add to preprocessor defenitions?

amoebae wrote: Hi Marty, I don't know if you can shed any light on this issue.

A bunch of people who use ReShade in The Sims 4 are reporting that MXAO decreases in strength, almost to the point of disappearing, when they enter the freecam mode (and returns to normal when they exit it). I can't replicate this problem, and I don't know enough about how it all works to understand what might be causing it. It almost looks like a scaling problem, like when effects don't scale with resolution and so become smaller and tighter iyswim, but it's only affecting some people, and there's no resolution change between gameplay mode and freecam mode.

Is this something you've come across before in any other game? What might I suggest to help them troubleshoot the problem?

Thanks

Edit: a thread about the problem is here . If you scroll down to the notes you'll see other people adding their own information about the issue.

Uncle Crassius wrote: I've never played Sims 4 but in Cities: Skylines changing to freecam, i. e. a mode without UI, seems to change depth buffer settings as well. With ReShade 3.4 you might try to change the depth detection setting under the new DX11 tab, that helped me in C:S.

Sims 4 is a DX9 game, all these years and no DX11 support, a shame really, as so many ppl would benefit from it.

Now, I don't know anything about how the shader works, not a clue really, so I'm sorry if I sound stupid, lol. I just thought I'd drop by this gif showing the issue in my game (which is not really any addition). For some reason, I GUESS, when entering free cam mode the depth detection changes(?) (I don't know what I'm talking about, ye), it gets recalculated. This always happened on my PC with this shader, so I thought things just worked that way, however, with the tumblr post @amoebae linked above I discovered many reshade users don't have that issue, and these can't replicate this.

Maybe it's because of some setting from NVIDIA Control Panel that messes with this? I'm lost and rambling about stuff I don't know, don't mind me. Does anyone have any idea why this happens, tho?
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Have you tried the display depth shader and checked if it also shows some difference?

@e371: you can't be bothered to actually open the shader file and read what's there or look at the MXAO pdf guide?

Marty McFly wrote: @e371: you can't be bothered to actually open the shader file and read what's there or look at the MXAO pdf guide?

While I get why you're snappy, the information isn't exactly too easy to look up. If you just download the shader upon installation there's no pdf included. You would have to go into this thread, look at the OP and then download that even though it says the last update is "1 year 5 months ago" so you don't even know if the infos included are up to date. And to look directly in the shader file isn't exactly obvious if you don't know how that stuff works in the first place, a layman might just expect a bunch of code stuff. I love ReShade and know my way around it but the documentation is a little spread out.

Marty McFly wrote: Have you tried the display depth shader and checked if it also shows some difference?

Yes, it does!
Freecam looks better, but the fact that it changes when switching camera modes is still an issue.
So I guess the problem isn't with the shader itself, right? fek

@gvbe: No, in this case there's nothing to do, sadly.
@Uncle Crassius: well, if you google "MXAO preprocessor options", 1st result is a page of this thread where I say that you gotta download the file from the first page and the last entry on first page is some forum where it's actually laid out how you do it. Just saying. But I get your point, I haven't been able to update the doc for a while and the current distribution setup of the shader doesn't allow for distributing pdf files along with the shader.

@Marty McFly:
First of all thank you for your work, i like your MXAO and it works great. Concerning the stuff related to preprocessor definitions i agree with @Uncle Crassius, it's definitely not not so obvious. For example i recently asked you about your qUINT MXAO compatability with Morrowind, it simply didnt work for me, but only yesterday I accidentally discovered that I just needed to add the SMMA_PREDICATION=1 to my preproccesor definitions to make qUINT MXAO work! I found this by accidentally reading the topic of depth buffer modification. And i allready know about the pdf guide that comes with shader, I just didn't know that GI is actually IL (MXAO_ENABLE_IL=1) that is allready setted in my config, or am I here confusing something? Another thing: I didnt fully understand is the MXAO_SMOOTHNORMALS=1 works for regular MXAO or it works for qUINT or for both? There are many questions which are difficult to find answers because of lack simple and understandable documentation. I'm not so lazy as you might think, I just wanted to use all the available functionality, but it's really hard for me to find it all.

Alright. I just called it GI because voodooman did so... Smooth normals works for both, qUINT MXAO is latest update of it, it'll be updated along with qUINT. If you open the shader file, you see all preprocessor stuff at the top listed.

And wait what, SMAA predication affects MXAO? WTF?

Hey Marty, thanks for all the neat toys. Keep up the good work.. I just wanted to drop in and ask if you guys have noticed a delay when moving the view around with this shader. I have tried to use it on ESO and it's pretty neat but the draw delay is very noticeable. You move and it has a delayed shadow effect almost like a blur. I'm running a I7@ 4.4 and a gamer x 1080 on a Predator 144HZ screen @1080p so I'm pretty sure my rig should have the balls to push it. I'm not complaining or asking for anything I'm just providing an account of my experience for your knowledge.

Uhm do you have the (old) version with temporal supersampling (TSS)? That one causes draw delay, but regular MXAO should have no delay (except lowered fps).

Marty McFly wrote: Alright. I just called it GI because voodooman did so... Smooth normals works for both, qUINT MXAO is latest update of it, it'll be updated along with qUINT. If you open the shader file, you see all preprocessor stuff at the top listed.

And wait what, SMAA predication affects MXAO? WTF?

Yes, for somehow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How i said, qUINT MXAO didn't work for me until I added SMAA_PREDICATION=1 to preprocessor definitions.