When the Performance and Quality modes on the Xbox One X are compared, and the game running on the Xbox Series X is compared to it running in Quality mode on the Xbox One X, one of the big issues brougth up is the lack of SSAO.
I’ve stopped running the game on my Xbox One X (which is dying) and am instead playing in on PC. With an RTX 2060 is is just about powerful enough to run the game maxed out at 1080p with 60 fps. But it also has made me play around with the graphical settings to see what impact they have.
And this is where the SSAO comes in. It’s extremely subtle, so much that I though it might not work on my setup. Not applying SSAO in areas that are lit directly by the sun or by another light source, but only in areas lit by the skybox and that are masked by shadows makes sense. That’s where you want to mimic the falloff of reflected indirect light. It also makes sense to apply the effect most prominently where surfaces form acute angles. And it makes sense to vary it with weather conditions and time of day. So, SSAO shouldn’t stand out by adding soot wherever surfaces meet, but just add a faint contribution to anchor surfaces in space.
But even so, I’m wondering if the SSAO is working as intended on my setup. While I have seen it appearing to have an effect in some areas when switching it to Ultra versus disabling it, most of the time there is no visible difference at all, and it doesn’t apply in many cases where I’d expect it to, like darkening the ground under a pallet. Rather, a lot of ambient occlusion is prebaked (buildings are a good example) and is unaffected by whether you enable or disable SSAO.
But this doesn’t fit in with the reports about the significant impact the lack of SSAO has when playing on the Xbox Series X.
Does anybody get a substantial difference on PC between SSAO being enabled or disabled?