What's the best type of ambient occlusion?

Fair enough. I'm just tired of seeing super shitty implementations of it - as you mentioned, games like Far Cry 3 overdo it to a ridiculous degree and it looks terrible.

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it's because they use cheap ao that doesn't tank performance, so consoles can have it.

>This is one of the officially chosen games to showcase NVIDIA's new HBAO+
I doubt it's even that bad innately. They just amplified its effect to make it artificially stand out for marketing.

this is not how shadows work wtf

Speaking of shitty implementations, here is a red pill.

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Hbao+ avoids the horrible dark halo effect you get from standard ao, which is one of the biggest annoyances. That said it also costs a lot more performance wise so not perfect. Depending on implementation it can also still be a bit too dark, but generally it helps ground objects, without doing it in an obnoxious way.

HBAO+'s selling point is it not costing much.
geforce.com/hardware/technology/hbao-plus/technology

holy christ that looks hideous

>that last set of examples
Real light always "occludes slightly" at contact edges because except in extreme cases, objects aren't ever 100% sharp at the edge, they're beveled. Since nobody (for reasons I actually don't fully understand, but whatever) goes around beveling every edge on in-game meshes, using VERY marginal AO on "lit" edges helps to mimic the real-life phenomenon of an object's shadow being sorta-kinda visible from the bottom of it, which helps to distinguish it as a separate object rather than a smooth extension of the object below it.

When developers start beveling all non-bladed edges in in-game meshes and the actual geometry reflects the tiny gaps that it's designed to represent, this "imperfect" AO solution will start being inferior rather than superior.

Raytracing, of course.

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That's an extremely backwards way of doing it.
You should use normal maps to smoothen out corners of objects, and this will look just right when the sunlight reflects off it.

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Featuring the brand new MAO+, darkening every single pixel equally for a more cohesive and right image.

the one that's off

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I disagree with this. I understand the argument, but the reason I disagree is the cost of beveling is 100,000s of tris in an age when GPUs can shit out MILLIONS of tris without breaking a sweat.

The real GPU bottlenecks are drawcalls and shader complexity... and people keep coming up with more and more ways of faking geometry using shader math, instead of just letting the tris do the work, which is what GPUs are optimized to render. Stuff like your pic are the place where normal mapping, parallax occlusion, etc., really shined; when the GPU could handle the shader math but the tri count was an actual bottleneck. Nowadays it's the other way around; we should be using tris to remove shader math wherever possible.

The only real argument against it is overdraw, because overdraw is an actual bottleneck, but it's easier than ever to automate LOD generation (either through shit like Simplygon, or through shit like Tessellation) in a way that lets you remove edge bevels easily.

Completely different disciplines.
People working on shaders and lighting aren't coding AI.

Yeah, get real shadows with Nvidia Raytracing™

>Uniy 5.4
That's like what, 4 years old news now?
Not to mention you can use or CREATE your own AO systems in Unity if you want.

This really triggerds me because I have a fair amount of experience tweaking various AO shaders and I know how irrelevant the NAME of the shader is opposed to the VALUES of said shader.

HBAO+ is generally the best since it's just an on/off kind of deal you can force onto a lot of games via Nvidia Inspector, but obviosuly some games can look better with the myriad of other types of AO that modders have made, and sometimes even a developer can make a better implementation for their own game(can't think of any examples though).

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...

This.
Give me some goddamn better gameplay and story and good writing of chars. Is graphic bs the easiest one to improve or are they just pushing their hardware sponsors agendas?
Well, then how about hiring less of the grahics guys an more and better coders, you stupid cunt. Stop defending shit practices, you corporate lapdog.

Woops forgot picture kek

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>just hire more coders lmaoooo

>Is graphic bs the easiest one to improve or are they just pushing their hardware sponsors agendas?
the "GRAPHIX!!" are the thing customers (literally) see first, and the element easiest to quickly demonstrate. This is why especially triple-A studios focus so much on them.

Combine this with the modern design mentality of "Press a button. Something cool happens!" , and we got these dumbed down gaming experiences, that might just as well be interactive films.
And since that shit's been an ongoing meme for over a decade now, there's a whole generation born and raised by that crap, making them more forgiving and accepting towards these streamlined experiences.