Add XeGTAO ambient occlusion - #983
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August 12, 2026 04:49
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Summary
Adds a Vulkan compute implementation of Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion based on Intel's XeGTAO.
The implementation is designed for vkQuake's existing renderer and does not depend on TAA or temporal accumulation. GTAO is disabled by default and can be enabled from the graphics menu or with
r_gtao.Features
Implementation notes
GTAO uses a five-level view-space depth pyramid followed by horizon sampling and an edge-aware spatial denoiser. Half-resolution output is reconstructed using full-resolution depth information to avoid bleeding across geometry edges.
The menu presets all use half resolution because this provides a better performance-to-quality tradeoff, particularly at 4K. Higher presets increase the number of horizon samples instead of increasing the AO buffer resolution.
Temporal accumulation was intentionally omitted because vkQuake does not have TAA or motion-vector infrastructure.
Changing GTAO between enabled and disabled requires a renderer restart so the renderer can switch its depth/stencil attachment usage and storage behavior. With GTAO disabled, the renderer retains its original resource and execution path.
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