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The option confused me where I had the choice between SSAO, HBAO and HDAO in Far Cry 3.

Hitting google didn't really give me any answers nor did enabling each option and comparing the results. Apparently I'm blind or something.

First off, which one's the BEST quality? Secondly, what's the real difference between these options?

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Just so everyone knows what this is: SSAO stands for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, HBAO = Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion, and finally HDAO is NOT the Highland Dancers Association of Ontario (that was my first Google result). HDAO is High Definition Ambient Occlusion. Essentially, different rendering modes. – fbueckert Dec 5 '12 at 15:30
That said, BEST quality is subjective. I recommend you remove that bit, as everyone will have their own opinion. The second question, though, should be answerable. – fbueckert Dec 5 '12 at 15:37
Positioning yourself so that one object is in front of a flat object (e.g. a person in front of a wall) and switching between the 3 options should make it fairly obvious if you look at the silhouette edge of the foreground object. In my opinion AO looks pretty bad in Far Cry 3 no matter which option you use, with considerable performance hit. I turned it off completely by editing My Documents>My Games>Far Cry 3>GamerProfile and changing the SSAO entry to 0. (Any adjustment ingame to the settings will reset it, though - so best to make that file readonly afterwards. Faster and better, imo – RibsNGibs Dec 5 '12 at 17:40

2 Answers

up vote 20 down vote accepted

H*AO offers better quality but with an increased performance hit.

SSAO is less accurate but improves image quality with a much smaller performance penalty.

If you're going to use H*AO, from what I understand you should select HDAO if you have an ATI card or HBAO if you have an nVIDIA card.

HBAO and HDAO are essentially the same thing but different vendor specific implementations.

Here are some BF3 screenshots that may help: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/kwjtw/my_battlefield_3_screenshot_comparison_ssao_vs/

I recommend using the link they provide here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bmorlok/6197863052/in/set-72157627662461565/lightbox/ and using the cursor keys to quickly flip back and forth between the 3 screenshots.

You should quickly be able to identify where the shadowing is taking place between none, SSAO, and HBAO.

Look at the areas where objects intersect. For example, where the floor meets the wall, where a pillar meets the ceiling, the bushes, the pieces of debris on the ground.

I took the liberty of snatching one of the photos and highlighting the areas you should be looking at while flipping back and forth.

You'll notice that SSAO shades in these same areas, but it's MUCH less pronounced.

ssao vs hbao

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I wouldn't say SSAO is MUCH less pronounced. I honestly don't notice that big a difference between SSAO the H*AO, but the performance hit can be quite noticeable. – musicfreak Dec 20 '12 at 7:33
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HBAO also implies the use of eye image plane techniques to simulate the differences in iris size when looking from certain levels of light into other levels of light.

HDAO does not do this.

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