Nvidia Inspector Ambient Occlusion

Figured I would share my findings after about 15 minutes of tinkering with Nvidia Inspector to enable ambient occlusion.

First off, it works well! Notice, especially under the tent to the right.

Before:
http://i.imgur.com/XBDl06M.jpg

After:
http://i.imgur.com/WdWRwWA.jpg

To enable you'll need an Nvidia video card, and Nvidia Inspector, but it's pretty simple.

Here's a screen cap of the settings I'm using.
http://i.imgur.com/wc5fLkQ.png

Note that there was no Path of Exile profile, and when I tried to make one, I was given an error, telling me that the executable was currently being used by Dragon: MMORPG (whatever game that is). So I'm using this Dragon game as the profile.

Ambient occlusion takes somewhat of a strong computer to run, and while there are three quality settings (performance, quality, high quality), I wouldn't recommend trying high quality unless you're running a top of the line computer.

As a comparison, I am running Quality on a 560ti 448.

I was surprised at how well this worked and the improvement it made to the game.

I don't get the hate about the graphics, This game is beautiful. I much prefer the realistic look in an age where everything has this bright cartoon shimmer.

This tweak just makes it even better.
Game does not seem to handle AO very well from a performance standpoint, and I have a very powerful machine. But performance option is still a very noticeable improvement.

Now to mess around with the AA options....

Well here's a bump, but also a modification.

I'm using the Fallout 3 bit. Have not tested the difference between FO3 and D3 D3 profile seems to corrupt the UI, immediately reverted back. Performance on my end was great in town and certain areas.. but others dropped it quite heavily.

Off: http://i.imgur.com/aTUAOl4.jpg
On: http://i.imgur.com/gNmImPS.jpg

I cannot believe I have been playing the game without AO this entire time; it looks so much better.

NV Inspector settings in case anyone's wondering: http://i.imgur.com/yoUdAXm.png

Edit: Seems to have an issue with grass in some areas at certain positions; the effect disappears at random. Was a bit jarring, but I'd take this over heavy performance loss. I'll try testing the D3 bit now and compare performance/effect.

Edit2: Seems it affects more than grass.. Was doing the Wharf map and the effect disappeared in certain areas. Zooming in also had a high performance impact and dropped me well below 60.

Did an orchard map with burning ground.. framerate went into the 30's and everything was all skippy. Oddly enough, GPU usage wasn't going over 35%, so there's some issue going on.

So, does still have issues, but oh well. If only NVIDIA actually made an AO profile the game..

Might try to test more bits, but ugh, sucks to discover these issues after everything appearing to be working great.

I already had a profile for Path of Exile, using the 332.21 drivers. It was already set to another AO compatibility option, see picture:

http://i.imgur.com/AqI5PVb.jpg

Hmm. Have to try this when getting home, just a month ago received 780GTX and last week I saw GeForce Experience -program had some "optimize" button for PoE and I'm not sure if I'm imagining things, or did it actually make it look better, atleast better in my eyes, without making anything to fps.

Anyone has any ideas how much does CPU do in the game, or is it more GPU based ? I'm running some years old AMD 1055T 6-core, but soon to move to Intel camp with 4770k. Not that the fps would be low at the moment, but seeing numbers improving is always nice--

looks great.. now someone make the SweetFX work with Nvidia cards..