Quality settings for AO and bloom

[ada-tv]

Our current ambient occlusion and bloom algorithms are quite heavy, especially in VR or with high resolution scales. Having ambient occlusion and bloom turned off entirely can drastically change the look and feel of a world in some cases.

Supporting low-quality modes for these would help bridge the gap between good performance and good visuals.

• AO: High (our current HBAO*), Low (depth-only SSAO, which might work on the forward renderer too)
• Bloom: High (our current multi-tap gaussian blurring), Low (linearly interpolated, fewer blur taps or potentially no taps at all)

*I think it's HBAO, I remember someone mentioning it

[HifiExperiments]

for AO I had made this a zone property (ambientOcclusion.technique) to give domain creators exact control over how AO looks. if we had some way of mapping HBAO properties to similar-ish SSAO properties then we could maybe move it to a render setting instead? it’s a balance between individual performance control and visual consistency across clients. (but we do already support both)

[JulianGro]

On both my machines, both Bloom and Ambient Occlusion have no measurable performance impact. I guess it depends on the hardware?

[ada-tv]

I guess it depends on the hardware?

It's also highly dependent on resolution. The framerate hit can be brutal in VR, where the display is high resolution and the scene rendered is twice.