Screen Space GI not working properly / bugged

Hey, so after we finally found the 2 settings that need to be ticked to enable it (why does everything need to be so complicated? Why is SSR and SSGI disabled from default? Which HDRP user would not want to use it? People optimizing can disable it later..)

We made some tests with the Screen space GI and it appears to be buggy and show no changes. Even with a extremely emissive objects or fully colored ground on a white cube, almost nothing changed. On a white cube it made some strange AO once in the shadows but no bounce light. I'm not talking about a very minimal effect but no effect, but it is clearly enabled and does do something sometimes a little bit.

Edit: we tried further on a very populated and colorful scene while playing more with light settings and it mostly seemed to very slightly darken some areas a little bit, but with raytracing it was lighting up the floor a tiny little bit but extremely weak, even in a direct comparison its very minor and unnoticeable. The colored objects did not appear to create any bounce light but the isolated ground areas lit up a little more akin to having very slightly increased exposure in a post process setting that would be far easier and cost way less performance doing it through a very slight grading. Putting a bright orange object near a bright yellow object also does nothing etc.

Either some threshold is set extremely low without giving a value to control it, or it is bugged right now, but there is no way to see anything substantial and our environments are full of color. Is it related to some other setting like exposure or how does it work? Does it require DX12?

 

Maybe this is not the best example but we tried in many areas and it was never more visible than this
With SSGI enabled, the bottom appeared a bit darker, making it actually look less like bounce light than without

I could post more screenshots but its almost impossible to see changes

 

Hey, thanks for the quick reply

We have the effect properly enabled and it visibly does something / works, but it is just far too weak without giving any control. We do not get the results like on your image

Could you maybe just add a intensity and threshold slider so it can be adjusted for the scenes and light conditions?
We are aware of screen space limitations but it just does not add any visible bounce lighting in our cases

I just tried in even another scene (this is darker lit however) and it does seem to partially do a nice AO effect but no brightening or bounce light that is visible

 

Here another comparison: (theres a lot more on the screen in bright daylight but only this part changes with a visible AO effect - the darker one is with SSGI (non raytraced)

Regarding the "enabled by default" - I wouldn't ask for it to be in the default profile enabled, but having it in the settings disabled on 2 different positions is very unnecessary if you just want to turn it on

 

After testing some more it does create a AO effect that the AO shader does not achieve, it can create more broad and realistic occlusion especially from a distance, which the normal one does not achieve but it does not illuminate at all just darken

Maybe it would be worthwhile to split this into a different AO effect and a brightening GI effect or I am having some bug

Here an image with GI and then one with AO only

You notice that the GI does a better job at AO than the AO, but no brightening.

I don't know about the performance but the Ambient Occlusion shader could greatly benefit from this GI behavior so please do not remove this effect

 

I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/haolange/Unity_ScreenSpaceLighting_Old

 

This Really look on par with precomputed lighting

 

I'm not getting the same results. It just seems to darken the edges a bit like SSAO, rather than lighting anything, and colour bleeding seems rather minimal. Admittely I'm not using baking because that's not an option in my game.

I do have to congratulate Unity on the performance though. Hardly any performance hit until I enable full res, on the Apple M1.