Depth based Post Processing shaders

[Miksel12]

Today I tried some of the depth post processing shaders (SSAO and DOF) from Ishiiruka and was quite amazed to see how good they looked.
This made me wonder why these effects aren't in Dolphin, I found this answer from MayImilae: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-possibilities-for-future-ray-tracing?pid=479532#pid479532

With not every game exposing depth information, I understand that it's not optimal but it won't break post processing shaders using depth, it just won't do anything.
And while I'm not sure, I think exposing the depth information to the post processing shader won't harm anything while enabling post processing shader using depth.
Besides that, with the amazing work of Stenzek with the videocommon rewrite, it would probably be way easier to implement.

The only thing required (Beside exposing depth information) is being able to apply post processing not to just the scan-out. Stenzek said in his videocommon pull request he was working on being able to apply Post-processing of XFB copies, but was put-off because of all the duplication and that that would be easier with videocommon in place.

I was wondering what other people have to say about this, I think it would be a great addition.

[JosJuice]

(04-04-2019, 02:52 AM)Miksel12 Wrote: With not every game exposing depth information, I understand that it's not optimal but it won't break post processing shaders using depth, it just won't do anything.

There are games that provide depth information that's completely wrong, most notably the Wii version of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

[Miksel12]

(04-04-2019, 02:56 AM)JosJuice Wrote: There are games that provide depth information that's completely wrong, most notably the Wii version of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Ah, I didn't know that. But I still think that that is justifiable for a post processing shader as they are a pretty obscure and with shaders like acidtrip, chrismas, spookey1 and mad_world, having a shader that is weird in some games (Weird depth in this example) is a non issue. 

[twotonkatrucks]

i second this. this would be a pretty neat feature to experiment with.

[JMC47]

One of the things the VideoCommon rewrite did was make this much easier to do. Stenzek has been working on it in the past.

[Miksel12]

(04-04-2019, 06:26 AM)JMC47 Wrote: One of the things the VideoCommon rewrite did was make this much easier to do.  Stenzek has been working on it in the past.

That is great to hear.