John, HFGI performance has regressed in 4.9. We dropped the adaptive sampling for DFAO + HFGI but then only optimized DFAO through the global distance field, so HFGI ends up being slower. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to revisit and make HFGI work nicely soon.
Note that you can always go back to the 4.8 method with ‘r.AOUseSurfaceCache 1’