I am curious about Ambient Occlusion is it worth the fps loss and which does it work?

I have a GTX 470 and I have never had a Nvidia card until now so I am experimenting with some settings. Anyway is there anybody using Ambient Occlusion with newer games and which setting peformance or quality? Does it cause problems with games that don't use it if it is enabled in Nvidia CP? Thanks for any info/help!

 

run the heaven benchmark with AO and see the difference with it on and off. with it on it looks a lot better but it comes at a cost of framerates

 

I haven't actually noticed much of a performance loss with it on with my 470. I just leave it set to the "quality" setting in the Nvidia CP and don't worry about it. It does make things look much nicer at times.

 

"Ambient occlusion is a shading method used in 3D computer graphics which helps add realism to local reflection models by taking into account attenuation of light due to occlusion. Ambient occlusion attempts to approximate the way light radiates in real life, especially off what are normally considered non-reflective surfaces"

Taken from wikipedia

It take a little of your fps and makes the light and its effects a little more "pretty" and just that. You can do like me, I put it on and if some games does not run very well, I turn it off.

 

I always explain it as a shadow within a shadow. I most games it just simply is a blob shadow around the object which does add some depth.

 

most of the time its pointless,.. Maybe in DeadSpace and that's about it,..

well most of the games like Grid, Dirt2, POP, NFS shift,.. already have their own and its useless to force it on top of that.

original AO technique with 19x.xx+ looked great with small impact, but now this new "improved" is a joke, i stopped using it with 256+..

performance mode looks crap

quality not much better, but takes a huge hit..

i tested in Cod4 MW and compared to old technique really it looks like some washed black spots even on quality its not so great as the old one..

 

It's a great way of pimping up Descent Freespace 2.

 

Hey everybody thanks for info and I have a decent idea about the purpose of AO. I like good quality while gaming so i will leave it enabled but will turn off if having fps issue in a certain game. Also I have Dead Space and I played today for the first time since upgrade from 5770, and the image quality in this game is much better than AMD/ATI cards. Thanks for info!

 

It seems that games that have an ambient occlusion option really need it to look any good, they seem to skimp on shadows then slap AO on top of the scene which is why it is needed. I have tested about 20 games with AO forced through the driver and in each game I have always found weird flickering shadows in certin parts ( such as on grass in FC2 and DA:O ) it looks like chronic aliasing when it flickers and sometimes makes games look worse.

So if there isn't an option in game don't worry about forcing it imo. Even if there was no performance hit, I stull wouldn't force it through the driver because it glitches so bad. Even games I used to think it ran fine ( and it did look fine in still shots ) ended up looking bad in actual gameplay.

AA on the other hand...there is no negatives to forcing that through NVCP however.

 

I didnt think many games had it. I think HL2 was the only game I tried it with.

 

The game must support it .... ;0)

Not many games support Ambient Occlusion ....

 

I'll have to give DA a try and see if i get that problem. Last i played it was back when i had my 4870. I haven't noticed that problem with any other games with AO turned on and set to quality in the driver though.