SSAO Performance?

Performance & Profiling
1

I’m experimenting with the new SSAO and noticed my scene takes a huge performance hit when I use it. I ran a simple scene (5 objects a total of about 5,000 polys, one 2048x2048 texture and one 1024x1024 texture). On my Macbook Pro here’s what I got:

Scene without shadows or SSAO: 500-700 fps
Scene with soft shadows or SSAO: 60 fps
Scene with both soft shadows and SSAO: 30 fps

Is this a typical performance hit when using SSAO or are there things I can do to improve performance?

2

Yes thats to be expected.
Shadows as well as ssao switch the render path and in consequence require dx10 class hardware to even run with more than a diashow … the 8600m and alike won’t go far above that minimum end though (8500GT desktop pendant) as such the performance you see is within the expected range

thats an initial hit btw, unless I’m wrong they won’t get much worse by throwing more things in.

3

Hi

I installed 2.6 yesterday, and cannot find where the ssao script actually is?

Can someone direct me please.

This is going to look great on the new castle pack i have out next week!

Best wishes

Steve

Arteria3d http://www.arteria3d.com

4

SSAO is “Pro” only. If you have Pro, then it’s in the Pro assets package. Just drag and drop the SSAO C# script onto your camera. I must say, that in spite of the huge performance hit, the result of adding both soft shadows and SSAO is really quite stunning. Now all I need is some hardware worthy of it. :wink:

5

HI

I have pro!, but i do not see this script anywhere. Its not in the pro scripts folder. Its not even listed when i want to manually add a script from the drop down menu to add to the camera, its no wher.

Thanks

Steve

6

Make sure you’re using 2.6 and that you’ve updated your Pro assets. It’s in the “image effects” folder. It’s there, trust me. :wink:

7

Hi

yes, its 2.6. I installed unity, then it seemed to automatically update everything.

Is there something else i need to do, if so please detail what steps… Im having a panic attack in my pursuit of the anticipation of seeing ssao on my content!!!

BEst

Steve

8

Go to Assets menu, select import package, and then import the Pro Standard assets in your Unity 2.6 application folder. Until you do this you’re still using 2.5x assets in your project.

Hey, where’s my Industrial Pack? (Just kidding, you should have received payment by now). :wink:

9

OK, found the script.

One thing im really confused about now… SSAO is apparntly doing nothing in my scene. When i add it to the camera, the scene looks exactly as it did before i added

Any ideas?

Thanks

Steve

10

Hi Steve,

The difference on my project is quite noticeable. By toggling the “active” tick box on the script I can see a very visible improvement. As I said before, the combination of SSAO and shadows (at their highest settings) was very nice. My scene has one directional light and 3 spot lights (and I’m on a Mac).

That was the good news. The bad news, and I’m guessing this is related to the SSAO script/shader, is that my cameras in that project suddenly stopped working. I tried removing the SSAO script, re-importing all assets, deleted the old camera and created a new one. No matter what I do the camera just shows a single bar across the center of the screen. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve submitted a bug report. Fortunately, this was just a test project so wasn’t critical or particularly large so I can recreate it from the beginning again.