- 8 cosine-weighted hemisphere rays per pixel (inline ray queries, SM 6.5)
- Distance-weighted AO: quadratic falloff (1-hitT/aoRadius)² instead of binary hit/miss
- World-space hash seed: voxel coord + tangent-plane frac position (stable, no flicker)
- Bilateral blur pipeline: 2-pass separable (H+V), radius 6, depth+normal edge-stopping
- 4-pass dispatch: shadow+rawAO → blur H → blur V → apply
- AO written to separate R8_UNORM texture, blurred, then applied to color buffer
- Debug mode (F5 x3): grayscale AO visualization