Z Buffer downsampling for nearest depth upsampling

Hi there, i am rendering volumetrics pass into a half resolution texture. Old problem: Adding it to my full res lighting pass will introduce ugly edges. Now i would like to implement a depth aware upsampling and to keep things simple i would like to start with the nearest depth upsampling. Here it is explained pretty well:
mutantstargoat → on-depth-aware-upsampling (use google pls. no links allowed here)

Now i feel extra stupid, cause i dont understand how the downsampling needs to be implemented. What i understood:

  1. Take the full res depth and send it to the downsample shader
  2. Attach a color attachement texture for the downsampled depth (half size - the texture you are writing to)
  3. Apply the filtering algorithm per fragment and write it to the attached downsample texture.

What i dont get: Do i render this pass with half resolution (glViewport(…)) ? Cause i dont get any good results. The “upsampled” image still looks jaggy as before

This is my downsample shader code (this pass is rendered in half resolution):

#shader vertex
#version 460 core

layout(location = 0) in vec2 position;
layout(location = 1) in vec2 texCoords;

out vec2 v_TexCoords;

void main()
{
	// Full screen quad
    gl_Position = vec4(position.x, position.y, 0.0, 1.0);
    v_TexCoords = texCoords;
}

#shader fragment
#version 460 core

in vec2 v_TexCoords;

uniform sampler2D u_FullResolutionDepth;
layout(location = 0) out float DownSampledDepthTexture;

void main()
{
	//Get max depth from 2x2
	float d1 = textureOffset(u_FullResolutionDepth, v_TexCoords, ivec2(0, 0)).x;
	float d2 = textureOffset(u_FullResolutionDepth, v_TexCoords, ivec2(0, 1)).x;
	float d3 = textureOffset(u_FullResolutionDepth, v_TexCoords, ivec2(1, 1)).x;
	float d4 = textureOffset(u_FullResolutionDepth, v_TexCoords, ivec2(1, 0)).x;

	DownSampledDepthTexture = max(max(d1, d2), max(d3, d4));
}

The upsampling is exaclty implemented as described in the link above:

  1. Pass both textures to lighting shader (full res depth and downsampled half res depth)
  2. Render lighting pass in full res
  3. Upsample my half res volumetrics texture by nearest depth

still no luck. i feel the topic is pretty nicely described here and there but all the important details are missing :frowning:

looking forward to little hint on this. thanks guys

Still jaggy:

Here is the bad result and second image what i would expect (maybe not that perfect but close to it. For showcase i simply rendered this in full res):