Latest Rise Of The Tomb Raider Patch Adds Support For NVIDIA’s VXAO Ambient Occlusion

The super-popular Rise of the Tomb Raider has today received a new patch on the PC, and it brings with it some great stuff. At the forefront, this patch introduces DirectX 12 support, although it’s being noted that most gamers are not going to notice much of a difference. Who stands to benefit the most are those with lower-spec’d machines. DX12 needs to be enabled in the game launcher, rather than inside of the game itself, and doing so will disable another new feature that’s made it’s way into the game: VXAO support.

“What’s VXAO?” That’s a great question, and one I would have asked as well if I didn’t have an NVIDIA email right in front of me. In short, VXAO is “Voxel Ambient Occlusion”, and with it, we might very well see the most realistic shadows to date. While HBAO+ passes a filter over a screen and applies a large radius AO effect, VXAO produces global and view-independent AO to a scene, potentially resulting in more realistic results. In quick testing, it also results in a slight performance drop, so you might need to fiddle around and see if it’s worth it.

(You can download the full images for comparison’s sake here)

There are no doubt better scenes to show off AO than the one above, but for the sake of time, I stuck with this one. While not seen in these cropped shots, the full ones (which can be downloaded above) show that AO off, on, and HBAO+ all deliver 60 FPS in this particular scene (and configuration) at 1440p, whereas VXAO drops that down to 51 FPS. For some reason, I couldn’t get the frame cap removed entirely in this game, so that drop could be even more than 9 FPS in the grand scheme.

Nonetheless, the example above does highlight a couple of things. A good one is that AO is important: without it, the scene looks a lot more bland. With standard AO, it’s dramatically improved, with more realistic shadows casting away from various objects, especially the watering can. HBAO+ improves on things by delivering a more focused result, which almost seems to add extra definition to certain objects (the branches to the left, as one example). So… what about VXAO?

Like most shadow techniques, whether or not you like VXAO is going to depend on personal taste, and whether or not you want your GPU to endure extra computation to deliver the better result. I do consider the result to be better, though. As we move up from AO through the ranks to VXAO, the scene continually becomes better-looking in minor ways, with VXAO delivering what I feel to be the best result in this particular scene. With VXAO, the shadows generally look even more focused than HBAO+, and more realistic as a result. The left side of the watering can is darker with VXAO versus HBAO+, and the shadow behind the leaves along the wall also strike me as being more believable.

What do you guys think?