185.20 now with Ambient Occlusion!

for anyone that has actually dealt with 3d rendering first hand, let me say that being able to render any Ambient Occlusion is extremely impressive. READ THE LINK if you want to know what it is doing, instead of just looking at screenshots.

the improvement this could make to most games is substantial. I have dealt with rendering AO passes for animation that take 2.5minutes PER FRAME.

for all the people talking this down, you are fools, and if you knew what you were talking about you would know why.

 

Ambient Occlusion for real gaming just kills fps.3d rendering is another ball game.
There is visual improvement but at a cost no gamer wants to see.And thats performance killer as this driver stands now. Just saying.

 

Yeah i am certainly not recommending it.

 

on a positive note,I gained 204 points in 3dmark06 with these drivers with AO-off. You can manually set it off via regedit ,rather then control panel.

But of course 3dmark06 doesnt reflect real games IMO.Just eye candy really to me.

 

Well these drivers must only give a performance on a high end GPU equipped laptop because I just put them on mine (spec in sig) in XP, cranked up GTA IV and MoH Airbone expecting to see an fps increase, at least in MoH Airborne and, oh look, nada, not even a drop in fps.

BTW - where is the AO setting tab, I don't have it, is it Vista only?

And if you can turn it off in the registry deadsoulaxix please could you tell us where the key is, thanks.

 

Anybody figured out how to get profiles for games that do not support AO to allow us to change certain features such as AA or AF?.... I click on AA or anything else and there is no drop down.... and I cant manually change them either... good drivers but this is pissing me off

 

I can totally see a difference in the Overgrown screenshots. I tried in on L4D and didn't notice much difference.

It'll be really cool once AO is better optimized and doesn't result in such a performance hit.

 

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/1441/ambientocclusionxo1.png
While being in a beta stage the 185.20 Forceware provide support for NVIDIA's upcoming products namely the GeForce GTX 295 and GeForce GTX 285
these drivers are geared towards high end GPU's really,mid and lower end will suffer more.

 

Thanks for the pic deadsoulaxix I see that the AO is Vista only (i.e. DX10), I should've read some of the other posts as well first before asking...

I don't generally game in Vista and I saw none of the fps boost in XP that is being reported, but I didn't get an fps drop either so I'll stick with them in XP, might go back to DOX 180.84.1 to do a comparison though (I did use fraps to check fps in MoH Airborne before updating the drivers to these new ones but I'll do one again to see if I'm just being an eejit ).

I might also try these in Vista to see if I get any better or comparable to XP performance (my rig seems to not like certain games in Vista (Race 07/GTR2 in particular) and stutters/gives low fps at times).

 

This is awesome! I just installed these drivers in Vista and they allow me to overclock again! This is a huge breakthrough since the old 169.04 drivers. YES! My go 7900 gs lives on!

How would that help? The Cryengine 2 has already supported Ambient Occlusion for a while now. It's one of those technical feats boasted by the engine before it came out. The problem has been that none of the drivers supported the feature until now.

 

If you look at the clump of grass in front of the shooter in Nauticus' pictures you can see that it's really dark at the bottom in the AO picture. That's what this is doing, any place where objects are going to block most of the ambient light it gets darker if there is no direct lighting on it.

No Ambient Occlusion


Ambient Occlusion


Basically it tests at each rendered point in the scene to see if any light type object (sky, actual light) is visible and if not attenuates the ambient component of the illumination. That's probably why the windows seem darker too, inside the room most of the light is being 'blocked' by the walls and shouldn't get much of an ambient component.

This could be cool, because maybe this will allow you to hide in the grass more easily? I dunno how realistic that is since I suck at these types of games.

All hat being said, anyone have any idea of how NVidia just 'added' AO to all games? Is it kind of screen space AO? I mean, can't game programmers do anything they want in their shaders? How does NVidia know what's a lighting calculation vs PRT or something else?

 

I ran these drivers and disabled AO and I still lost 20-30 FPS in Source games from the Beta Nvidia Drivers. And for ****s and giggles I enabled AO on high in CSS and went from 100 FPS (NO AO) to 9 FPS (AO on high). I didn't notice a major difference in the game tbh

 

I'd like to point out that if your gaming on a rig like mine (Asus in sig) I wouldn't bother with these drivers, I get no FPS increase whatsoever, not in Medal of Honor Airborne or GTA IV anyway and you would have thought it wouldn't be game specific where one game gets an fps boost and another does not.

The best latest drivers I have are the Dox 180.84.1 drivers, they actually gave me a couple of fps increase overall.

This AO feature seems pointless to me, unless you stand around looking at the scenery all day in shooters or any other game there isn't much point to it, other than to tax your system when taking screenshots so you can go "ooh look at what my rig can do"...

 

GTA IV seems to run a bit better after installing these drivers, AO off of course.

That's purely subjective, I don't have numbers to back it up.

+rep to loos for the stellar explanation of what AO does.

 

How do we get games that do not support AO to allow us to change attributes such as AA? Cause there is no drop down menu?