This includes big improvement:
- The horizon search is decoupled from the BSDF evaluation. This means using multiple BSDF nodes have a much lower impact when enbaling AO.
- The horizon search is optimized by splitting the search into 4 corners searching similar directions to help which GPU cache coherence.
- The AO options are now uniforms and do not trigger shader recompilation (aka. freeze UI).
- Include a quality slider similar to the SSR one.
- Add a switch for disabling bounce light approximation.
- Fix problem with Bent Normals when occlusion get very dark.
- Add a denoise option to that takes the neighbors pixel values via glsl derivatives. This reduces noise but exhibit 2x2 blocky artifacts.
The downside : Separating the horizon search uses more memory (~3MB for each samples on HD viewport). We could lower the bit depth to 4bit per horizon but it produce noticeable banding (might be fixed with some dithering).