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The Daily Insight

What does SSAO mean?

Author

Ava Robinson

Updated on June 04, 2026

Screen space ambient occlusion

Subsequently, one may also ask, should I use SSAO?

1: SSAO – Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

Graphically impressive games, especially newer ones, may suffer in quality with this option. However, if you do not emphasize that with your gaming, this is probably your best bet. In short: It works well, sacrificing graphical quality while still looking good on older PCs.

Subsequently, question is, what's better SSAO or HBAO? 4 Answers. H*AO offers better quality but with an increased performance hit. SSAO is less accurate but improves image quality with a much smaller performance penalty. If you're going to use H*AO, from what I understand you should select HDAO if you have an ATI card or HBAO if you have an nVIDIA card.

Also question is, does ambient occlusion affect FPS?

The typically frame rate hit you can expect when enabling Ambient Occlusion is between 5-10%. There are exceptions though, such as Apex Legends. Poor implementation at launch mean Ambient Occlusion could cause you to lose up to 20% of your FPS in Apex Legends.

Does SSAO hurt performance?

If you're someone that wants realistic graphics, then motion blur should be on there. SSAO looks great, but if its barly notiable in some games and impacts the FPS too much. It really improves the look of a game I think, especially in indoor areas where ambient lighting would be more crucial to the visuals.

Related Question Answers

Do I want anti aliasing on or off?

Anti-Aliasing is very demanding and is probably the first thing you should turn down/off when struggling to run a game smoothly. However, it plays a vital role in reducing jagged edges and noticeably improves image quality.

Is anti aliasing good?

Anti-aliasing can be important because it impacts your immersion and performance within a game, but it also has a performance impact on your games by taking up computational resources. If you're running a 4K resolution on a 27-inch monitor, then you probably won't need anti-aliasing.

Should I use anisotropic filtering?

Generally, anisotropic filtering can noticeably affect framerate and it takes up video memory from your video card, though the impact will vary from one computer to another. When the in-game camera views textures from an oblique angle, they tend to become distorted without anisotropic filtering.

Does ambient occlusion affect CPU?

Definitely lower most physics, if possible, since they tend to take up a lot of CPU. Also, try to lower LOD; it puts a load onto the GPU, but the CPU also has to calculate all interactions. Antialiasing, ambient occlusion, anisotropic filtering, and resolution are pretty much all GPU, so I wouldn't change those.

Does depth of field increase performance?

All that depth of field does is add some blur to the scene, but it's still a very interesting effect when it comes to performance. The performance hit can be as low as 3 percent (e.g. Rise of the Tomb Raider) and as high as 22 percent (Dying Light and its advanced DOF algorithm).

What is HBAO tarkov?

HBAO (Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion) – This is a resource eater. Turn it off. Sure it can make your game look more realistic, but if you're looking for performance increases this is one to have off. SSR (Screen Space Reflections) – SImilarly you don't need SSR on and will save on some processing power.

What is VSync used for?

What is VSync? Short for vertical sync, VSync is the graphics technology responsible for synchronizing the frame rate of a game to the refresh rate of a monitor. This synchronization delivers smooth, uninterrupted gameplay for graphics-heavy 3D games.

Is ambient occlusion realistic?

Ambient Occlusion is a term which is used in computer graphics. However, there is no ambient occlusion in the real world. It is a rendering technique in the world of graphics that can duplicate the shading of light on an object in the real world. This method is implemented in real-time games, animation fields etc.

What is motion blur gaming?

What is Motion Blur and What Causes Motion Blur? Motion Blur is an effect in which the surroundings appear blurry to our eyes when either we or the surroundings are moving at some speed. This is because our eyes cannot focus on a single object due to the rapid movement of our head.

What is occlusion in gaming?

First, let's define occlusion. In graphics, ambient occlusion is simply the point at which an object stops light from a source, as well as the point in which an object throws light or shadow in its created world. It is what adds depth to a scene in a video game like Crysis or a movie like Pixar's Monsters University.

What is SSAO quality gaming?

Screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) is a computer graphics technique for efficiently approximating the ambient occlusion effect in real time. It was developed by Vladimir Kajalin while working at Crytek and was used for the first time in 2007 by the video game Crysis, also developed by Crytek.

What is ambient occlusion GTA?

Ambient Occlusion (AO) adds contact shadows where two surfaces or objects meet, and where an object blocks light from reaching another nearby game element. In Grand Theft Auto V though, the setting's a tad bugged, and is awaiting a fix to restore full functionality.

What is occlusion method?

In 3D computer graphics, modeling, and animation, ambient occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. Ambient occlusion can be seen as an accessibility value that is calculated for each surface point.

What is ambient occlusion blender?

Ambient Occlusion is a sophisticated ray-tracing calculation which simulates soft global illumination shadows by faking darkness perceived in corners and at mesh intersections, creases, and cracks, where ambient light is occluded, or blocked.

What does post processing do in games?

The so called post-processing is the process of applying filters and effects on an image of a game! In this process the game renderizes its images, however before it is sent to the monitor another rendering process will occur about the original image, then a lot of effects and filters will be applied directly on it.

What is anti aliasing in game?

Anti-aliasing is a method by which you can eliminate jaggies that appear in objects in PC games. Most PC games have an in-game window where you're able to adjust graphics settings, including anti-aliasing. Other PC games require you to enable anti-aliasing when you first launch the game.

What is tessellation in GTA V?

TESSELLATION-Adds realistic geometry to objects. Eg. a car attacked with a knife will show lifelike realistic scratches and dents. The wrinkles in skin will be totally apparent. Tree trunks will show patterns just like in real life(max tess reduces 8 fps).

What is Nvidia VXAO?

NVIDIA VXAO: Voxel Accelerated Ambient Occlusion is simply the highest quality ambient occlusion available in PC games today. VXAO's world-space algorithm offers superior images, smoother response to camera movement, finer details and better accuracy than screen-space solutions.

Is higher anisotropic filtering better?

The anisotropy levels run from 1 to 16, each defining the degree to which mipmaps can be scaled by. Of course, higher levels will have a higher performance impact, but the image quality is incomparably better in comparison with bilinear/trilinear filtering.

Does anisotropic filtering cause lag?

Those options don't have a large effect on input lag, no. The settings that affect delay most are VSYNC (adds a lot of lag), TRIPLE BUFFERING (also a lot), and REDUCE BUFFERING (set this to ON to lower your lag).

What anti aliasing should I use?

The most common post-processing AA is FXAA (Fast-Approximate Anti-Aliasing). This peculiar anti-aliasing algorithm may repulse many gamers due to the blurry image, but if you have limited system horse-power, it is likely your only choice as it's the best anti-aliasing method for performance.

What is Max anisotropy?

The amount of anisotropic texture filtering to be used when rendering the material property's image contents. Availability. Mac Catalyst 13.1+

What is anti aliasing used for?

Anti-aliasing is a technique used by users to get rid of jaggies that form on the screen. Since pixels are rectangular, they form small jagged edges when used to display round edges. Anti-aliasing tries to smooth out the shape and produce perfect round edges.

What does texture filtering do?

Texture Filtering identifies the point on the texture at which a particular pixel is drawn from, samples nearby texels, and spits out the correct colour. AF is an improvement on the old bilinear and trilinear filtering techniques, producing sharper, clearer textures no matter what angle they're viewed from.

What does anisotropic filtering do?

In 3D computer graphics, anisotropic filtering (abbreviated AF) is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces of computer graphics that are at oblique viewing angles with respect to the camera where the projection of the texture (not the polygon or other primitive on which it is rendered) appears

What is distortion Valorant?

Distortion - Enables/Disables cinematic effect that simulates realism; Shadows - Enables/Disables shadows (can help with low FPS problems).