The Final Fantasy XV benchmark shows that NVIDIA VXAO technology has a strong impact on game performance, causing strong frame drops, of up to almost 40FPS, in the game.
Video game fans increasingly want more complete and realistic solutions within games and that, logically, demands more from a graphics card. Final Fantasy XV is a very demanding game, and even more so its benchmark, which has the Turf, HairWorks and Flow effects, which are included within NVIDIA GameWorks. Additionally, the game has two additional effects, such as VXAO and ShadowWorks. A user of the English forum Resetera, known as icecold1983, has enabled VXAO in the benchmark, to see what the performance divergence is with and without this technology.
VXAO is a technology that is only available with NVIDIA graphics, which is based on ambient occlusion and is quite similar to HBAO +, but it apparently slows down processes three or four times, compared to HBAO +, but the graphic quality is better, at least, that's the promise. The screenshots that have been published show a comparison between the use of HBAO + technology, which corresponds to the first image and VXAO, which corresponds to the second image.
It should be noted that the environmental occlusion point is greatly improved thanks to VXAO technology, which gives us an improvement in the depth of the image. These environments become more natural, more realistic, but the price to pay is a strong impact on performance. The image of the first benchmark shows that VXAO causes a drop of 39FPS, compared to VXAO. There are scenes or sections of the game, where the impact is less, so it shows that the performance will be more or less pronounced, depending on the scene. VXAO is clear that it is an NVIDIA technology designed to be used in high-end graphics cards.
