nvidia AO

Unity Engine
1

The current driver of nVidia cards has the option of turning ambient occlusion on or off.

Does this mean that unity can use ambient occlusion feature of the graphics card in future releases without even writing a shader for it?

I sure hope it does. :slight_smile:

2

In theory, but there are three problems with Unity supporting it:

  1. It’s an nVidia-only feature
  2. It’s probably a Windows-only feature
  3. nVidia lets you force it on from the control panel, meaning no 3D game has to support it directly for it to work
3
  1. indirectly it has to support it. Because the shader rewrite can actually crash the game (generally any driver enforcement is a bad idea as they are the main cause for instability. The AA enforcement is one of the best examples)
4

Didn’t NVIDIA only implement this feature for a small set of games?

5

I think they said that it would be easy to add it to games:S

Here is some reference I managed to dig up http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10.5/direct3d/Source/ScreenSpaceAO/doc/ScreenSpaceAO.pdf

6

Here is some reference I managed to dig up http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10.5/direct3d/Source/ScreenSpaceAO/doc/ScreenSpaceAO.pdf[/quote]
We’re talking about different things now.

One is “just turn on a checkbox in NVIDIA driver”. This thing NVIDIA has implemented for a small selection of games, and all is needed is the NVIDIA driver, the checkbox and having your game to be chosen among “the select ones” by NVIDIA.

Another thing is “implement screen space ambient occlusion yourself”, which is the white paper you linked to. There are tons of various SSAO approaches, and some pretty good ones already developed on this forum (see one from Russian Madman for example). In any case, SSAO is neither very easy nor very cheap.

7

I see. Thanks for clearing this up.

I thought there was some driver-side option that could be integrated to existing games automatically.

The ones on these forums are nice, I have been watching their progress for a while. I just dont have the Pro license, so its not much use to me at this point :slight_smile: