SSAO Pro vs Sonic Ether SSAO

I own both SSAO Pro and Sonic Ether SSAO, and I figured some might be interesting to see the difference between the two. I don't claim these tests to be perfect science, and I hope neither developer minds me posting this, as I feel they are both very good (and both are world's better than the default solution). First off here is a visual comparison on settings I feel look pretty good, but with the intensity dramatized to see the difference more easily.



Here are some things I noticed in my not-so-scientific tests in the editor at 900p:
• In a still image, Sonic Ether's looks better to me at any setting. The color bleed which SSAO Pro lacks adds so much drama! It looks like GI sometimes. I don't use any baked GI in my game so this is great for me.
• At the low end, SSAO Pro has less artifacts in motion (less low frequency noise), but more artifacts in a still (like some gaps in tight corners).
• At the high end Sonic Ether looks better both in motion and in a still, but can use 30% of my frame at 5ms+, so its not an option for me.
• I can get SSAO Pro down to 1 ms and have it look passable (medium samples), while 2.5 ms was about as low as I managed to get Sonic Ether period (even with use downsampling and half sampling checked) and at that setting, although still reads GREAT in a still, has quite a bit of noisiness in motion.
• I didn't even benchmark SSAO Pro at high settings, because if I was going to pay that much per frame I'd definitely want that color bleed.

So to summarize my thoughts, SE looks better all around at the high end, but is slower. Pro is faster, but looks worse in stills artistically and technically. I still haven't decided what I will go with. I have to decide if the extra motion noise and 1.5 ms worth the beautiful color bleed.

 

The pseudo bleed brings something very pleasant to the scene.

If you're targeting PC you could have options that have variety SSAO settings, so you don't have to exactly decide.

 

This was really useful to me, thanks for posting.

 

Can you post some video? I'd be really interested to see the difference in the motion noise.

 

I haven't showed my game in video yet and this would be kind of a weird reveal that people could dig up. I guess I could do it on some test construction but I haven't made one of those and it would take some work to do a good video comparison. I'm sorry! I know that would be useful.

 

Great comparison. I own SSAO Pro and was curious about the differences.

I'm not 100% convinced on the color bleed. It has a drastic effect on the mood of the scene. I feel like that's something you either want or don't want, and if you do want it perhaps you just want it for specific areas or want more artistic control over it. I also feel like you may have it set a bit high in your examples here? When I view the images one by one in my links the difference in the mood of the entire scene, especially for the tavern, is huge.

To be honest it almost looks like SSAO on and off to me. Your Sonic Ether intensity and/or radius has to be a lot higher than for SSAO Pro in these scenes?

In the cave I definitely prefer the look without color bleed, i.e. the SSAO Pro look. In the other scenes it's hard to tell because the differences are so big I can't help but think you're comparing with completely different settings.

Here's an imgur album of your images for easier comparison:
http://imgur.com/a/5ZsXo

And here's direct links for those who want that.

Scene 1:
http://i.imgur.com/MgxBr8l.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/bx2zdgj.jpg

Scene 2:
http://i.imgur.com/A7bUOX5.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/CP2cOAC.jpg

Scene 3:
http://i.imgur.com/UP4E6kw.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ERrPbg4.jpg

 

@TwiiK I have it cranked up to basically double what I would normally do for both types. And with Sonic Ether you can control the color bleed independently of the value ao, so you can do like half that saturation and keep the darkness. There's also a "Reduce Self Bleeding" flag which reduces a lot of the deeper saturation and is checked by default but I unchecked it. The radius' are hard to compare because they are different tech and the values don't correspond. In both cases I had the radius near default settings, but if I worked to make one look like the other I could probably get them closer. Its a difficult comparison for sure.

 

you do realize that colour bleed is a setting you can very easily just turn off in SESSAO ... right?

 

Thanks guys for putting up a comparison. I have SSAO Pro but I'm not sure about purchasing Ether's..

It's going to be really tricky to compare these two. setting need to be as close as possible to do a fair comparison. I would like the guys from Alloy to take a look at this and get really anal with the settings.. Yes Anton, I'm talking about you! I need that analness with your well trained eye to help me out here.

 

@RB_lashman Obviously, but then I don't see any point in switching to Sonic Ether's if you already have SSAO Pro so the color bleed is what I'll compare them by. If I didn't have either asset then I would go in depth about the more subtle differences in them.

And if color bleed SSAO takes off as a the new must have feature then I'm sure the SSAO Pro developer(s) will add it as well.

But by looking at these images I'm not convinced color bleed is a setting I would use for my games. Perhaps for stylish games, but I'm not sure. Like I said in the tavern scene for instance that's a mood I either want or do not want. And if I want it I'm not sure adding it through SSAO is the way to go. Rather the opposite. SSAO is often one of the first setting to be turned off on lower end rigs. If it drastically changes the look of your game then that's not ideal in my opinion.

Edit: But these scenes look like they're from Skyrim so good job on that at least, @djweinbaum.

 

Consider buying it to see for yourself in the context of your own game. If you end up not using it its not a big deal. Consider how much time you saved Anton for a mere 30$.

 

I've purchased over 300 assets I can tell you it's that "mere" attitude that adds up to be a lot of money spent.

I'm in the process of finishing two projects I've been working (85+% complete) after that I'm considering using Unreal engine for my next one, I'm going to need very impressive post effects for that project and Unity can't deliver that.

But if talented people like Ether and Thomas Hourdel fill that void in Unity's post effects then I'll probably continue to use Unity.

oh and I don't think Anton will consider it time wasted when taking a look at this. He's very much anal about AO

 

Sonic Ether did mention he would look at optimising IF people think it needed it, so why not direct him to your results?

I also bought both, and there's other things to consider like if it works well on alpha test foliage or whatever really.

 

Can i just say that your scenes looks great!

 

So how do both products hold up to alpha tested foliage, hippocoder?

 

I'm really interested in foliage also.

Yeah, as said, on one hand buying both is only $55 - but those little purchases really do add up. Plus there's all the time spent testing various scenes using both, etc.

Personally, I think the bleed looks pretty amazing. But the mention of motion artifacts sounds like bad news.

 

Thanks @djweinbaum, I was just thinking about asking about the differences between these two.

 

+1.
BTW, can you post somes pictures without SSAO?

 

Those images do look fantastic and it gives a nice color to the scene

Although i found a little artifact where it renders the AO on top of the vegetation:


It's more noticeable when you switch back and forth between those two images through the album http://imgur.com/a/5ZsXo

 

Hey guys, just thought i'd pop in and mention something that might be relevant to discussions of effects handling foliage. I found a horrible bug in Unity's deferred renderer this morning that seems to effect all implementations of SSAO (stock, ssaopro, sessao).

In short, alpha-cutout (and some transparent) shaders are still writing to the normal buffer regardless of whether that given pixel is transparent. Example shot of Unity SSAO (in terribad setting mode to highlight issue):



We'll be filing bug reports about this today, as it looks like the behavior varies between combinations of forward/deferred shaders being used in both forward and deferred mode (its a matrix of F***ery I tell you).

 

Yeah I noticed that, but with some tinkering of my cutout foliage shader I was able to remove it. I just assumed I sucked at shaders.

 

HAH found the problem! Looks like forward-only shaders are NOT writing to the CameraDepthNormals texture properly. Buuuuug report time.

 

A visualization of the F***ery if you're at all curious. This is likely at the root of alll SSAO-draw-order issues currently occurring.

 

I'm not a graphics guy but I thought I'd throw something out that that might be relevant. I'm red/green colorblind. Doesn't mean I can't see those colors, I just see far fewer shades of them (and many colors such as oranges and dark yellows or some purples and blues look the same to me). That being said, I have to squint and look pretty hard to even notice the difference between the two. So for colorblind folk the difference is far more subtle.

 

Does this look like the issue to you @xenius? I have this issue with every single SSAO package!

 

@djweinbaum YUP same class of draw artifact.

 

I'm really glad you figured this out and mentioned it because I would have never known. Thank you.

 

Hey guys, just posted an update to the Camera Depth Normals stuff I've been debugging ALL F***ING DAY. grrr

Check out the post here for info:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/sessao-high-quality-ssao-w-color-bleed.323511/page-2#post-2116509

TLDR: if you are having this problem, it was Unity's fault, appears to be fixed in 5.1 (mostly). Some corner cases still exist.

 

These scenes look absolutely incredible, honestly. Where are they from / who developed?

 

The OP's own game project.

http://www.eastshade.com/
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-eastshade-a-game-about-exploration.251469/

 

Honestly? I like the look of SSAO Pro better. Sonic Ether looks kinda blurry to me.

 

Two spots caught my attention in the tavern interior.
1) In Sonic Ether there is a surprisingly strong darkening / AO effect up and down along the right edge of the fireplace on the left side of the scene. This appears to completely absent in the SSAO Pro, not just less intense. If going for more realistic lighting, I would think SSAO Pro might be preferable since the Sonic Ether result along that edge makes it look like the light source is a bit behind the camera.

2) In the inside corners visible in the two set of shelves to the right of the door, the SSAO Pro effect seems dark / intense. The Sonic Ether effect is lighter in those corners (which seems to be the opposite of the overall differences between the two sets of screenshots).

Excessive AO effects like along the fireplace really bug me, and while settings can be adjusted, I’m just surprised by the difference.

The shelves surprised me more in how they seemed to be the reverse of the differences seen in all three images otherwise.

I don’t need SSAO effects for what I’m working on now, but I’ll be watching both packages for future use. Looking forward to more comparisons.

 

I'm not sure I agree with this - that SESSAO isn't much better than SSAO Pro unless you are using color bleed. I have not used SESSAO, but from the images I have seen, the falloff / bias / radius for SESSAO seems much more natural. I appreciate that these parameters can be adjusted, but out-of-the-box good looks are nice also. That being said, when comparing just SSAO without color bleed, do you really think the two brands are (generally) indistinguishable?

 

I hope so. An 'orange-bleed-color' would be very fine with my 'desert-planet' project.
and i would not have to buy another SSAO for this.

 

EDIT :

Oops, wrong thread.



Long live the SESSAO !

 

They both work but I had to diddle with my fragment shader ie cutoff - I don't alpha blend foliage at all though so your mileage will vary.

 

Out of interest, do either of these work on mobile?

 

You should compare HBAO as well - its color bleed is superior to SESSAO's version.

 

Did you mean the old one from Standard Assets or the new one from Cinematic Image Effects? I always thought the new one is also made by the SSAO Pro dev.

 

Just because it wasn't mentioned:

There is another SSAO Implementation on the Asset Store, HBAO.
AFAIK it actually uses the Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion technique, which is superior to SSAO in some ways (but more expensive AFAIK).

Works fine in my project, also has Color Bleed, and it DOES reduce the amount of false occlusion around object shillouettes.

Would of course be cool to include that in your comparison, as it brings a slightly different algorithm to the table... but yeah, its another 25$


EDIT: Dang, two posts too late... @Howard-Day did mention it. Remark to myself: don't start to skim read text when a thread gets long.

 

I switched to HBAO some time ago. Full disclosure: The dev gave me a copy free to review, and I gave him some feedback on it during development, but that has not impacted my decision to go with it, or my opinion of it (I don't think). HBAO wasn't out when I initially posted this, and I don't have time to add it to the comparison (nor could I because so much has changed in my game).

Here is the review I left for it on the asset store: