Depth-aware upsampling experiments (Part 1: Nearest depth)

This post is about different depth aware techniques I tried in order to improve the upsampling of the low resolution Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) texture of a VKDF demo. VKDF is a library and collection of Vulkan demos, written by Iago Toral. In one of his demos (the sponza), Iago implemented SSAO among many other graphics algorithms [1]. As this technique is expensive, he decided to optimize it by using lower resolution textures and render target, which he then upsampled to create a full resolution image that he blended with his original one to display the result. For the upsampling he used linear interpolation, and as expected he observed many artifacts that were increasing by lowering the SSAO textures resolution.

Some time ago, I started experimenting with methods to improve that upsampling in order to familiarize myself with Vulkan. The most promising ones seemed to be the depth-aware techniques:

Continue reading Depth-aware upsampling experiments (Part 1: Nearest depth)