You’re right, it’s not in 4.14 preview. It was implemented in another branch and I forgot it didn’t get integrated into the 4.14 branch in time, sorry about that. I don’t think it will make 4.14 at this point (only bug fixes allowed).
What I heard from our artists about SSAO in VR was more along the lines of differences between eyes causing strain, since SSAO only operates on what’s visible and each eye sees different things. SSAO without temporal AA definitely needs a spatial filter, same with SSR. Anyway I hear you guys that SSAO support is desired.
In our projects forward is 22% faster than deferred, but 4xMSAA is 25% slower than temporal AA. So they kindof cancel out if you go from deferred + temporal => forward + msaa. But forward can support either AA technique. MSAA is not expected to be a fast anti-aliasing technique, quite the opposite since it increases the cost of the base pass (esp small triangles) while temporal AA is purely a post process.
I think that’s shaders compiling, which can take a long time if you don’t have too many cores =) Give it some time.