# SSAO with reconstructed depths yields strip artifacts

I wrote an ssao algorithm with compute shaders and view-position-reconstruction from the depth buffer. It works great for objects near by but results in strip or banding artifacts for large planes further away:

This does not happen if i use an explicit position buffer. I don't think this is because of floating point accuracy. My methods to reconstruct the position for the original pixel and the z coordinate for the pixels in its hemisphere:

vec3 calcViewPos(vec2 texCoords, float depth){
vec3 clipPos = vec3(texCoords, depth) * 2.0 - vec3(1.0);
vec4 viewPos = vec4(vec2(invProj[0][0], invProj[1][1]) * clipPos.xy, -1,
invProj[2][3] * clipPos.z + invProj[3][3]);
return(viewPos.xyz / viewPos.w);
}


I use a GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32 depth texture. I could solve the problem by a little hack: Comparing the normal of the original pixel and the normal of the neighbourhood pixels and skipping those which have a too similar normal solves this problem (since this only occurs on those large plains), but causes an additional texture lookup in a for loop, which costs too much (and would make using a position buffer again more efficient).

Did any of you experience a simillar problem or have ideas of how to solve this smarter? Thank you very much :)

• Are you offsetting the depth positions with a bias value? And are you using any depth clamping? And what is your depth slope factor? Dec 3 '21 at 12:05
• @pmw1234 yes i tried to increase the bias already, but that just shifts the banding along the view-z-axis and of course lowers the quality of the remaining ao. No i don't use depth clamping. If you mean the fov, its 70 degree Dec 3 '21 at 21:51