Comment by asperous
4 years ago
Games aren’t made to look physically realistic at all costs; it’s an artistic effort to try to make games look visually good, communicate with players clearly, and balance performance.
SSAO is subjective if it looks good, but it often does communicate corners and edges clearly which may be what they are going for.
Right. SSAO is a cheap way of emphasizing depth and edges. You might as well tell a line artist ‘you know, real objects don’t have black lines round the edge?’.
I don't think SSAO is really ever selected over more realistic methods for artistic preference. High budget animated films tend to go for ray traced methods even when they have a non-photorealistic style.
SSAO is just cheap.
For what it's worth, the existing game console hardware at the time was the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, so SSAO really would have been ROI back then.
'just cheap' = 'actually viable at 30-60fps on mid-spec PC/console'
If you have to real-time light everything, then there's not a lot of other viable options to make your scene look a bit more solid and objects look more grounded for the cost of just a couple of milliseconds of GPU time.