HTrace GTAO vs. URP SSAO
Overall Quality
URP's screen space ambient occlusion seems to be based on the The Alchemy Screen-Space Ambient Obscurance Algorithm rather than on any of the known horizon-based approaches.
For the following 2 screenshots, both algorithms were tuned to roughly match in performance (~0.85 ms.) and visual appearance in terms of coverage and intensity.
Foreground zoom:
Background zoom:
Peak Quality
URP's SSAO doesn't scale well in terms of the quality of tracing and denoising. As a result, even when performance or resolution are not limiting factors and higher quality is desired, it's not always possible to achieve with URP's occlusion. HTrace offers higher scalability, providing much better visual results.
URP's parameters are set to the "High" preset here, and HTrace uses its medium to high settings.
Upscaling
HTrace features an advanced upscaler, including an adaptive Lanczos filter inspired by FSR 1.0 and improved with bilateral weights. This makes it more viable to render the effect in half resolution and then upscale it, retaining as much detail as possible.
Last updated