As you may already be aware of, the PC benchmark of Final Fantasy XV featured three specific NVIDIA GameWorks effects. These three effects were: Turf, HairWorks and Flow. The final version of the game will support two additional effects, VXAO and ShadowWorks, and Resetera’s member icecold1983 was able to enable VXAO in the benchmark tool, showcasing what gamers can expect from this technique.
According to NVIDIA, VXAO is a new ambient occlusion technique that is 3-4x slower than HBAO+, while its results are much better than HBAO+. And as we can see in the following comparison screenshots, there are some slight visual improvements.
Ambient Occlusion is stronger and better thanks to VXAO, something that adds an extra layer of depth to the overall image. As such, the environments can feel more natural thanks to it, however, it comes with a huge performance hit. In some cases we are looking at a 40fps hit, so yeah… this setting is only for those that own the best high-end GPUs.
It’s also worth noting that in some scenes, there are minimal differences. This can be easily noticed in the last two comparison screenshots. Nevertheless, it’s cool that Square Enix will be offering PC gamers the option to enable it.
Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition will release on March 6th. Enjoy the comparison screenshots below (no-VXAO is on the left whereas VXAO is on the right. We strongly suggest opening the images in new tabs in order to see the differences between them).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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So why is this better than HBAO?
stronger and more accurate effect than HBAO+
At the cost of 40 fps hit, no thanks HBAO+ is enough
over time this probably will replace HBAO+ just like how HBAO+ replacing nvidia original HBAO.
That is likely due to the hairworks bug that should be fixed in the retail version.
Hope so.
VXAO isn’t necessarily stronger. It’s just more physically correct. It is world space as opposed to screen-space, meaning it will properly take into account surrounding geometry.
With SSAO, you get darkening and it looks nice, but it’s often wrong and unrealistic, and definitely shows that in many cases.
Outside scenes are not very good at showing ambient occlusion in general, indoor scenes are much better for that.
VXAO algorithm can be slightly better at times, but not really worth the implementation.
Instead of the screen space data, VXAO actually gathers information data from a world space voxel representation of the entire scene, which covers a much larger area, from the viewer’s point of view, hence the fps hit, in my opinion.
‘Rise of the Tomb Raider/ROTR’ also had this feature as well. And with VXAO mode, this game took almost 10 FPS performance hit.
At least with RotTR the addition of VXAO looked pretty damned good and way better than the already impressive HBAO+. In this game’s screenshots the improvement is much less evident.
Yep, VXAO looked really nice in TR. I’m not seeing a huge diff in these screens though.
They did a grand job with the PC version of said one-time Xbone timed exclusive.
Indeed.
IMO Beter solution is old HDAO (made by ATI) or HBAO or New AAO (Approximate Ambient Occlusion, this one is used in NFS Payback, better than HBAO+, w/less FPS Hit) also AAO is in Normal Mode and Enchance Mode called AAO Full (this one is best but uses more resources)
Looks the same.
Looks way better IMO. A car interior shouldn’t be that well lit up.
No, the car interior should be shadowed like that. Maybe this case is too dark, but that could be due to a variety of reasons including dynamic range adjustment and so on. What I can say for sure is that the lighting in the first pic is physically incorrent compared to the second.
The inside of the opened door is somehow lighter than the outside in the first pic. Think about that, that shouldn’t be the case. In real life, the inside of the car /truck is heavily occluded and covered by the surrounding geometry, meaning it’s much darker inside than outside. The second picture shows this well, because it is more physically correct. You can see the incorrect lighting in the first picture. The inside of the car, including the seats should be significantly darker than things which are not being occluded from the sky lighting.
Look at the second comparison too. The large bush/tree on the lower left of the picture. Look at the AO around that. With VXAO, you get realistic AO beneath the tree. This is physically correct and is what you get in real life. With HBAO, you don’t see that. This effect is infact a lot like dynamic global illumination in cases like these. You can look at Kingdom Come : Deliverance, which implements Global Illumination, and see a very similar effect under trees.
nVidia the way it’s meant to be gimped.
It’s not NVIDIA’s fault that the game has flat lighting..
that it to be expected since VXAO is not pre-baked effect like most AO effect used in majority of games.
not few more shadows.
The AO is much more accurate and physically correct. In open world scenes like it won’t make as much of a difference. In more enclosed areas, it makes a huge difference. Just look at the first comparison. This might seem small, but to many people, myself included it’s not a small thing. This feature essentially acts almost like global illumination in these scenes, which is fantastic. The lighting becomes much more believable and realistic. You can see this in ROTR also. There’s a very big difference in enclosed areas, but almost no difference in open terrain.
VXAO actually takes the world space (surrounding geometry) into account, not just screen space (only what is rendered on screen).
In a game like this, it’s probably not worth it for most people, but it’s entirely optional so I don’t see the issue. Would you rather have the devs remove that option ?
I agree, I will be playing at 1440p on a 1080ti judging by the demo I can afford to enable it. ^_^
Well said. There’s seemingly much ignorance surrounding what VXAO is. When done right (see Rise of the Tomb Raider) it looks superb and is leagues better than HBAO+, etc.
On the first screenshot VXAO looks indeed better, but I think it would be more beneficial to direct GPU power into something else
Looking good but that performance hit is too strong. They do not know da wey.
It’ll never cease to amaze me what console devs can squeeze out of those current gen systems, or implimenting their own fx. Meanwhile Nvidia is all like “nah, sod that, we’ll just cripple every card currently out and force people to wait and pay top price for our new GPU’s”.
There is usage of raw power, and then there is forecefully crippling that power, forcing it to a point where no amount of power can tame it until a decade later. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the business or enjoyment of waiting a decade for current technology to actually be sued and said tech running decently on higher end hw.
I honestly want Nvidia to actually put all their heart and soul into making the tech they constantly boast about, working on multiple cards of theirs. They always boast about how much better it looks at their tech demo presentations, but when it’s finally added into some games, it looks so pathetic in overall quality/performance, to which they then suggest you buy the latest high end GPU, the high end GPU that can’t even tackle that technology until another 5 years pass when a newer card is out and doesn’t suffer too badly to 5-10yr old tech.
It’s so weird, as to how I’ve looked at all the varying fields of technology we’ve created over the past century alone. We’ve come a long way and we’ve actually made real progress in those different fields, but when it comes to gaming, companies like Nvidia cannot seem to ever create tech that can both advance and run fluidly within the current time frame. it’s always about them creating tech no, that’s meant to be used 5 or more years into the future, effectively telling everyone to bugger off and go home, only to come back 5 years when it’s actually ready to be played as it should have been 5-10 years ago.
Imagine if we had Nasa playing the Nvidia game, we’d have never made it to the moon, let alone getting anything off this planet, doing things the Nvidia way.
Agree, at least console developers are forced to optimise their games on limited hardware. Console game like uncharted 4 looks better than many unreal engine 4 tech demos, yet PS4 is many times slower than PC.
But at least on PC we can turn off certain things that we dont like/need, as long as Nv gameworks is optional, I’m fine with that.
The other thing that absolutely does my head in, is that those of us who actually put out for higher end hw, hardly see the return in full in using it. Nvidia flat out cripples the high end cards, thus making the return entirely negligible, to the point of where it was rendered moot to even bother with their high end cards in the first place.
Yeah, in general the world has been playing their game in regards to space flight and travel. The world is still not at peace and famine is still plaguing 3rd world countries, all of which eats into resources that could be used for better technologies.
As things are, both AMD and Nvidia GPU’s are rising in price, so building a PC this year, let alone a decent one, is not the right time.
John you need to step up your game and make a mobile version if dsogaming asap