Voxel Ambient Occlusion (VXAO)
Above we can see an example Nvidia provided showing normal SSAO compared to VXAO, with no texturing present. VXAO clearly improves the accuracy of the shadows, but it's more useful to look at what it does to a fully rendered game instead of a tech demo. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, there are now four available settings for GM200 class hardware: Off, On, HBAO+, and VXAO. On vs. off shows how without AO, objects and the game world can feel rather flat. HBAO+ vs. On results in incremental improvements to the shadows, while VXAO vs. HBAO+ is a far greater difference. In particular, VXAO does a great job at creating shadows underneath objects, where normal AO often leaves those areas looking "too bright."
The catch as before is that VXAO is far more demanding; AO and even HBAO+ are typically only a 3-8% hit, but VXAO drops performance by around 20% over HBAO+, or 25% compared to no AO. It's not something most users are going to be able to use right now, unless they have GTX 980 Ti or above hardware, but the next generation Pascal GPUs should have more fuel in the tank for such effects.
