Gadgetory

the goal this content is to show that H Bao vs. SSAO in battlefield 1 does not have a major impact performance between AMD or Nvidia we already benchmark the game on our GPUs now we're back to benchmark just the ambient occlusion settings and before diving into the benchmarks the plan is to go over what ambient occlusion actually is what horizon based is versus screen space z-buffer and its impact on how these work and all that stuff but before that this content is brought to you by Roseville and their new Cullinan case which has a limited offer that includes a power supply with the purchase of the Cullinan tempered glass side panel the case let's start with the name ambient occlusion occlusion is the obstruction of one object by another and ambient in this case is a reference to the ambient light source in-game for almost all games ambient light comes from a single source and for battlefield that's a faked Sun which is really just a light traced across a skybox ambient light scatters more or less everywhere in game and that's with a mostly uniform pattern but there's also directional light which impacts how the light meets at a single point and that makes for uneven shadows and lighting on certain surfaces depending on where the lights coming from occluded surfaces are the most noticeable as recipients of uneven shadowing and light objects that are visible to the player but are not visible to off screen light sources will feel the most bereft of natural shading the best earliest example of this mix of directional and ambient light is the movie Toy Story wherein Woody's a mouth appears LED backlit almost like a monitor and that's because of the mix of ambient and directional sources of light this can be resolved with various AO techniques ao methods help approximate shadowing of areas with mixed levels of light interaction this used to be done with shadow tracing and CGI but has generally been far too expensive on system resource available in crunch in real time it's a lot different when you're rendering it for a movie gaming GPUs use SSAO HD a ohpa ovx AO or any number of other real-time ambient occlusion solutions or you could always go off of course screen space or SSAO is the most prevalent and assumes the entire world is limited to the z-buffer so that's anything that exists outside of the z-buffer or the cameras perspective basically what you can see in the game actively is not traced to calculate shading on screen here's an example of that this is an image of a tank with SSAO enabled and note that the underside of the tank is not shaded despite the fact that naturally the underlying ground beneath the occluding body of the tank would actually be darker than the rest of the ground this happens because the tanks underside is not drawn in the z-buffer it's not visible and not visible to the player so it's not rendered obviously a geometry isn't needed why would you draw it so we instead turn to other techniques to resolve this issue of uneven lighting the X AO is one of the newest methods not really the point of this video today but it is used in Tomb Raider and the same image of the tank shows the change the x AO isn't alone though other forms of AO like AMD's HD AO not too prevalent these days and Nvidia's HB AO plus also not that crazy hound but it isn't some gamers titles have both resolved issues with attenuation out of frustum objects noise and grain within shadows and this continuity we've talked about this in the past - earlier this year I wrote about a 2000 word article plus or minus about ambient occlusion and other game technologies that impacts lighting and shading hfst all that stuff but we'll cover briefly here VX AO just kind of as a point aside because I didn't mention it basically converts the scene into voxels so it takes all the geometric data converts it into voxels and that's so that the pixel shader can use the Z buffer as an input and from that point it performs all of the proportions to basically approximate the shadowing on the scene but battlefield 1 does not use VX AO so today we are focusing on HBO or horizon based ambient occlusion and SSAO screen space ambient occlusion so the question is does HB AO negatively impact and these performance in a way which is demonstrable in a way which would make AMD look worse in benchmarks than Nvidia the reason that question came up I suppose is because technically HB AO is an Nvidia made technology but it's from 2008 so the answer the short of it is no not really at least not in this game battlefield one can either run screen space or horizon based a o and again HBO is from 2008 it's well documented at this point if you want to learn more about it that'll field one as far as we are aware does not offer HBO Plus at least the options don't call it that but maybe the developers were just lazy our testing methodology is all the same as the battlefield Juan GPU benchmark that we published earlier today so you can view or read the previous content if you have questions about what drivers reuse test location multiplayer and singleplayer scaling other curiosities it's all defined before you post a comment to check there the only difference is that we ran our new tests with battlefield version 1.01 that's important that includes performance optimizations overall within the game and for that reason we reran some of our dx11 tests on the two devices under test here just for the specific HB AO vs. ssao benchmark so again 1.01 and before we get into the AO here's a look at the scaling we're seen on battlefield version 1.2 1.0 1 we're getting about a 1.5 percent better performance on the RX 480 and on the GTX 1080 fairly uniform between the two though higher framerate gameplay with lower resolutions is posting a performance improvement of about 3 to 4 percent but that's really only visible when we're north of 100 FPS already for tests where frame rate is closer to 60 to 80 we're seeing a 1.5 percent performance gain with a battlefield version 1.1 and we still retested HPA OH&S sao with the newer version of the game just to make sure we're isolating the variable here's a look at HB AO vs. SSAO on and these are X 480 with 1440p ultra settings there's no real impact here this is 1440p we're seeing a performance delta of about 1.4 percent or right around one FPS is very nearly within normal test variants though we always test multiple times and average the collections of results so it is a hard 1.4 percent this isn't just normal arjun of air or anything like that at 1080p with ultra the difference is about 3 FPS so it's a little bit more from 90 to 93 average and the lowers are basically unimpacted they're all pretty much the same the next thing to determine is how it plays out on Nvidia since we can't yet reached a conclusion with just this one settings change all this does so far has tossed at a higher quality ambient occlusion setting is more in which everyone already knows here's Nvidia's GTX 1080 at 4k high seen a performance win of again almost exactly one point four percent so that is the same as what we saw on Andy's Hardware between Sao and HB AO with a higher resolution which is taxing other aspects of the GPU enough that it's just a 1.4 percent scale in between each reduce in the GTX 1080s resolution to 1440p our performance Delta is now about 2 FPS average and that's pretty much the same as what we saw in AMD so the conclusion very briefly disabling HB AO creates a scaling at higher resolutions between nvidia and AMD that is effectively equal that's because the GPU is taxed elsewhere the resources are occupied so we've got about a 1.4 percent change and because it's the same on each card it doesn't matter if you enable or disable it the results will be pretty much linearly comparable and the game looks better and it's 1.4 percent so if you're just playing and you're not benchmarking probably have it on anyway because if you really need one FPS you're in bad shape and it's time to get a new GPU or reduce the settings elsewhere as for the lower resolutions that's where we see a little bit more of a difference it's a three percent difference versus 3 FPS versus two fps obviously it depends on the scale of the range of the data which is different between the two cards but the percentage difference basically is a 1% advantage for Nvidia at lower resolutions when running frame rates that are in the 80 Plus range 80 to 120 fps in this point so it's really not significant in the scheme of things 1 percent only at the higher frame rate test runs and that's generally going to be with lower resolutions where you're not bottlenecked just because you're pushing so many pixels through the pipe anyway so hopefully that answers that is always patreon link the post roll video if you want to learn more about ambient occlusion all that stuff there is a link in the description below there's two ones the GPU benchmark for battlefield one the other one is our description definition deep dive article on ambient occlusion and other game technologies so as I said patreon link post related helps that directly links below subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you