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Stable SSAO in Battlefield 3 with Selective Temporal Filtering
With the highest-quality video options, Battlefield 3 renders its Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) using the Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO) algorithm. For performance reasons, the HBAO is rendered in half resolution using half-resolution input depths. The HBAO is then blurred in full resolution using a depth-aware blur. The main issue with such low-resolution SSAO rendering is that it produces objectionable flickering for thin objects (such as alpha-tested foliage) when the camera and/or the geometry are moving. After a brief recap of the original HBAO pipeline, this talk describes a novel temporal filtering algorithm that fixed the HBAO flickering problem in Battlefield 3 with a 1-2% performance hit in 1920x1200 on PC (DX10 or DX11). The talk includes algorithm and implementation details on the temporal filtering part, as well as generic optimizations for SSAO blur pixel shaders. This is a joint work between Louis Bavoil (NVIDIA) and Johan Andersson (DICE).
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