GeForce 185.20's ambient occlusion

[Buddy J]

Ambient Occlusion is a new 3D feature intended to add realism with the GeForce 185.20 driver package, but it comes with a performance hit (http://www.tcmagazine.com/articles.php?action=show&showarticle=251).<br /><br />Original Post (http://icrontic.com/ticker/geforce-18520s-ambient-occlusion)

[UPSLynx]

Ambient occlusion isn't a new technique, and it's been toyed with in games before, but as far as I know this is the first time it's been done in real time.

This is exciting.

Ambient Occlusion has been used for a long time in the film/VFX industries. It's one of the principle methods used when it comes to realistic lighting on a scene. It's great to see real time graphics boundaries being pushed again, and here's to hoping the technique gets tweaked enough that we don't see big performance hits in the future. I suspect there will be a day soon when AO in games is as common face as bump mapping is today.

Occlusion itself has been employed by the gaming industry for awhile now. Cryengine 2, for instance, uses occlusion during render to ignore rendering of polygons that aren't visible by the player. This significantly lightens the strain on the hardware, resulting in higher frame rates.

It was only a matter of time before ambient occlusion entered the mix. I'm glad to see this being approached and can't wait to try it myself. Soon we may see an end to the terribly annoying 'glowing' effect that assets have in current video games brought on by lighting limitations. This drives me up a wall. That, and surfaces that should be blocked by another object still receiving light from an occluded source. AO would be a great solution to those limitations.

Ray Tracing would be a better, more realistic solution to the lighting dilemma, but as we saw at SIGGRAPH this past summer, ray tracing is only just now becoming possible in a real-time environment and framerates are hardly compelling on even the most powerful machines.

Still with me everyone? I'm tired, my head hurts.

[Bandrik]

What?! Nine thousa--- I mean, ambient occlusion!? Real-time on Nvidia? Holy smokes, that's awesome news!

It's making me start to itch for an upgrade. My rig was a mid-high level machine, as in 7.5/10... 4 years ago. 7800GT. AMD X2 cpu. Whopping 2 gig's of memory.

It's still goin' strong, but... yeah. *jealous rage*

[UPSLynx]

Can anyone tell me where to find this beta driver?

I'd really like to try out the AO, but I was unsuccessful on the site.

I don't typically look around for beta drivers though.

[mas0n]

Guru3D has them:

XP 32-bit (http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-185.20-XP-32-bit-download-2154.html)

Vista 32-bit (http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-185.20-Vista-32-bit-download-2155.html)

Vista 64-bit (http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-185.20-Vista-64-bit-download-2156.html)

[Thrax]

Guru3D typically has all such elusive beta drivers. If you can stand their awful god damn site, it's the place to be for that stuff.