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GeForce 185.20 Released - Now With Ambient Occlusion

AuDioFreaK39

AuDioFreaK39

Senior member
XFastest are the first to release the new GeForce 185.20 drivers, including a new version of Folding@home for NVIDIA GPUs.

http://www.xfastest.com/viewth...d=17608&extra=page%3D1

Links are now up:

Folding@home_GPU_v620nv


GeForce 185.20 XP (32-bit)


GeForce 185.20 XP (64-bit)


GeForce 185.20 Vista (32-bit)

^ These drivers are confirmed working for Windows 7 Ultimate build 7000 as well.


GeForce 185.20 Vista (64-bit)



Interestingly enough, these new drivers contain a new Ambient Occlusion setting in the Nvidia Control Panel:


http://img84.imageshack.us/img...mbientocclusionxo1.png


Don't forget to read the description of Ambient Occlusion at the bottom of the image.


The effect of Ambient Occlusion is particularly emphasized in titles such as Crysis:

OFF


ON
 
Originally posted by: dguy6789
Someone needs to benchmark the ambient occlusion feature.
Click to expand...

Don't think it has performance hit. No extra detail. It looks like the they turned down the brightness level and turned up contrast and call it ambient occlusion. 😛
 
These are still in beta. However, they are noticeably faster than the 181.00 with AA & AF on. 3DMark06 gave me +12.5% @1920x1200 with AA8 & AF on (the difference was less than 1% with AA & AF off). More to it, Lightsmark08 returned a score of +15.2% compared to what I was getting with the 181.00. I haven't run any game benchmarks yet but it seems that the guys at nV are really putting some effort in these drivers.
 
More discussion on other boards indicates these are causing lock-ups left, right and center. Seems like a pre-beta version. Plus why the jump from 181 to 185?
 
That's how nvidia does things now I guess. They release 1 official driver a year, and 1 beta driver a month
 
Originally posted by: zod96
That's how nvidia does things now I guess. They release 1 official driver a year, and 1 beta driver a month
Click to expand...

Since June, Nvidia has released 5 WHQL drivers, and 5 beta drivers. Vista 32 alone.
 
Well, I just tried these drivers, no problems installing them, seem ok so far. I am on XP SP3 tho. Only ran COD4 so far and not for long, however, it seems the Blacks are Blacker so far, other than that they feel about the same so far as the 181.00 drivers.

Larry
 
Saw something on PCGH about these which linked to this comparison from Hardware-Infos. Most impressive were the huge gains in STALKER Clear Sky with AA enabled. Looks like Nvidia once again manages to support DX10.1 on their DX10 hardware. I'll wait for them to pop up on NV's site before I install, but the last few driver releases have been quite exciting.
 
Originally posted by: chizow
Saw something on PCGH about these which linked to this comparison from Hardware-Infos. Most impressive were the huge gains in STALKER Clear Sky with AA enabled. Looks like Nvidia once again manages to support DX10.1 on their DX10 hardware. I'll wait for them to pop up on NV's site before I install, but the last few driver releases have been quite exciting.
Click to expand...

Those gains do not seem possible in Stalker. 87fps to 135fps at same settings. The driver must not be rendering correctly although it probably looks fine. All other benchmarks were within 1-2% of each other with the 180.48's. CoD4, Crysis, Dead Space, Far Cry2, Left 4 Dead and Assassins Creed all very close to each other. Stalker CS marks are a driver bug. Has to be.
 
Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
Originally posted by: zod96
That's how nvidia does things now I guess. They release 1 official driver a year, and 1 beta driver a month
Click to expand...

Since June, Nvidia has released 5 WHQL drivers, and 5 beta drivers. Vista 32 alone.
Click to expand...

there was a period of half a year where nvidia did not release any drivers, than for a couple of months only betas. But since that and before that they have released pretty regularly. During that time they were working on CUDA and porting physX and integrating the employees from aegia. So that is probably why they didn't have working drivers to release (those early cuda drivers were too buggy and incomplete).
 
Originally posted by: dguy6789
Someone needs to benchmark the ambient occlusion feature.
Click to expand...

Here is the results of my 5 minutes of benchmarking Far Cry 2:
Ambient Occlusion
Off: ~45 FPS
Low: Low 30's
High: Low 20's.

That's setting the control panel, loading the game, walking around 1 minute, quit, repeat. Nothing scientific but the results are dramatic, for me anyway.

Also, with it on high or low the grass looked - just wrong.

If it matters to you, E8400, Asus P5N-E SLI, Nvidia 260 216 core, 4 GB, Vista 64.
 

Originally posted by: zod96
That's how nvidia does things now I guess. They release 1 official driver a year, and 1 beta driver a month
Click to expand...



Originally posted by: keysplayr2003

Since June, Nvidia has released 5 WHQL drivers, and 5 beta drivers. Vista 32 alone.
Click to expand...


Ouch. That got shot down very quickly.
 
Originally posted by: Ocguy31

Originally posted by: zod96
That's how nvidia does things now I guess. They release 1 official driver a year, and 1 beta driver a month
Click to expand...



Originally posted by: keysplayr2003

Since June, Nvidia has released 5 WHQL drivers, and 5 beta drivers. Vista 32 alone.
Click to expand...


Ouch. That got shot down very quickly.
Click to expand...

I agree. I think the whole drivers arguement is getting a bit ridiculous. Personally, I have had no problems running either ATI or nVidia. They have both had their issues in the past, but I don't think it is really relevent to the discussion.
 
very well put archangel.

Ok so so far, zoinks is saying it doesn't look good in far cry 2... anyone try it in other games? Those screenshots of crysis show an awesome improvement IMAO. It goes from an obviously cartoonish rendering to almost photo realistic. (at least as far as I could tell from the lowered resolution of those pics). I'd test it myself but I really can't restart my PC in next few days, so I can't install the drivers.
 
Crysis already have that feature. Nothing new with the pictures.

Nice with new features thou! Benchmarks are looking good as well. Will be interesting to see the final results once Nvidia officially releases them. 🙂
 
The ambient occlusion feature gives a very noticeable increase in the visual quality in Crysis. The foliage especially looks amazing. I can't believe this game can look even better yet.

I used the Crysis GPU benchmark to test the performance because it was clear that this new feature was affecting it. The "High" ambient occlusion setting gave me a 20% performance hit. The medium and low settings gave appropriately less of a hit, BUT on medium and low settings, the grass and foliage had very noticeable shimmering issues. It was very distracting. In short, high was the only setting that worked without issues, but the resulting performance drop made the game unplayable for me.

Through the use of custom graphics configurations available online, it is possible to achieve similar results without the performance hit. Ambient occlusion on High still does look better though, IMO.

I can post some screenshots and graphs here if people express interest.

I also tried the feature briefly in CSS and COD4 but I could not notice any difference in visual quality even on high.
 
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