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Performance Boost - Ambient Occlusion

Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
edited September 2009 in PC & Technical Issues
Was helping a few people in-game with getting a bit more performance out of the game, when one of them (@Rune) went ahead and did some independent testing and joined in.

It turns out that if you go into nVidia's Control Panel and turn OFF Ambient Occlusion, you can nearly double your framerate within the game. This was confirmed by myself, @Rune and a couple others.
Post edited by Archived Post on

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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    ShadowDrakken wrote:
    Was helping a few people in-game with getting a bit more performance out of the game, when one of them (@Rune) went ahead and did some independent testing and joined in.

    It turns out that if you go into nVidia's Control Panel and turn OFF Ambient Occlusion, you can nearly double your framerate within the game. This was confirmed by myself, @Rune and a couple others.

    *goes and tries this*

    Any idea what Ambient Occlusion is actually for?
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    It adds subtle lighting details. Honestly, it's not really something that should even be in the control panel of your graphics card. Games that have the feature (like CO) should just let you control it from there.

    But yeah, it typically comes with a fairly hefty performance hit for not very much of a visual boost.
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Where is the option to disable it? a screen shot would be nice
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Nvm found the answer apparently its only for vista/7 users so XP is out of luck =\
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Ambient Occlusion is off by default.
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Indrid wrote:
    Ambient Occlusion is off by default.

    it was set On by default on mine
    regardless, turning it off made a huge difference
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    I turned my Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames option up as high as it could go and noticed a slight boost in performance too. Not sure if this will work for anyone else, but it couldn't hurt to try.
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    AvengerUK wrote:
    *goes and tries this*

    Any idea what Ambient Occlusion is actually for?

    Basically ambient occlusion changes lightning to give shadows a more "Realistic" look, particularly in corners and crevices. It makes it so areas that would get little direct light in the real world have more of a shaded appearance.


    I hate this option because it can make a huge hit to your FPS for what IMO is a very subtle and barely noticeable change to your graphics.
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    It's not a subtle change in graphics for me. IMO it's the diff between good and bad graphics as much as anything else is.

    However, this isn't some breakthrough. Ambient occlusion is an in-game option and I'm sure we've all tried turning it off to get better performance.
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    I searched for it in-game and didn't see it.

    Anyway, I agree it's not very noticeable in a lot of games, but in CO it adds quite a bit to the appearance of the world. That said, I'd rather have my framerate back up to tollerable levels than the nice shadows in the corners.
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Ambient Occlusion (SSAO for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) is usually enabled on DX9.0c or DX10 compatible graphics engines. There is SSAO in the game settings. Turning it off provides a moderate boost to FPS. Usually, SSAO isn't a totally significant image quality, and can only be really noticed on terrain/environment in CO. It is best to turn it off, as the image quality is not worth the FPS loss.

    Post Processing, However, is another story. It is a significant amount of image quality, as well as FPS. In CO, it is worth turning this on.
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Something interesting I discovered was ENABLING AA in the Nvidia control panel.

    The in game AA looks odd and sort of blurry to me, so I forced AA through the control panel instead, and while it has less visual effect than in other games, it does look a good deal better. The HUGE difference though was the FPS BOOST it gave me, I tried turning it on and off again and noticed better framerates.

    Hovering above M city without any AA I got about 42 FPS average (nearly all on high besides draw distance sliders at 100%, no AA and low shadows). After turning on 4xAA in the control panel I logged into the same scene and got about 52 FPS average, I then turned it up to 8xAA and got about 55 FPS average. When I get home from work today I will try turning it further up, since getting better looks AND FPS is a rather sweet deal ;)

    Anyway I have noticed this in a few other games, and it seems to be caused by poor utilization of the GPU and too much stress on CPU's, so putting more load on the GPU actually serves as a carrot on a stick and makes the whole thing run im better harmony. One other game which had this for me at least is WAR, which much like CO got rather poor optimization.

    Even after the FPS boost there is still no way I can turn shadows to medium/high on my Geforce 9800GTX, apparently Cryptic can't code shadows without it killing 50% of the game performance...

    For reference my PC setup is:

    3,16 Core2Duo
    4 gigs RAm
    Geforce 9800GTX
    Vista 32 bit
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Wasabee wrote:
    Something interesting I discovered was ENABLING AA in the Nvidia control panel.

    The in game AA looks odd and sort of blurry to me, so I forced AA through the control panel instead, and while it has less visual effect than in other games, it does look a good deal better. The HUGE difference though was the FPS BOOST it gave me, I tried turning it on and off again and noticed better framerates.

    Hovering above M city without any AA I got about 42 FPS average (nearly all on high besides draw distance sliders at 100%, no AA and low shadows). After turning on 4xAA in the control panel I logged into the same scene and got about 52 FPS average, I then turned it up to 8xAA and got about 55 FPS average. When I get home from work today I will try turning it further up, since getting better looks AND FPS is a rather sweet deal ;)

    Anyway I have noticed this in a few other games, and it seems to be caused by poor utilization of the GPU and too much stress on CPU's, so putting more load on the GPU actually serves as a carrot on a stick and makes the whole thing run im better harmony. One other game which had this for me at least is WAR, which much like CO got rather poor optimization.

    Even after the FPS boost there is still no way I can turn shadows to medium/high on my Geforce 9800GTX, apparently Cryptic can't code shadows without it killing 50% of the game performance...

    For reference my PC setup is:

    3,16 Core2Duo
    4 gigs RAm
    Geforce 9800GTX
    Vista 32 bit

    worked for me
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Even turnign it off within the game, does nothing for me.
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Following this suggestions I turned AA in game to off, and set it at 16Q in the Nvidia control panel.

    Prior to this was getting average 20-30 fps, sometimes reaching 35.

    With this change in place, I went to 58-65 fps.

    Great work Wasabee!

    (I'm on a 9800GT)
    Wasabee wrote:
    Something interesting I discovered was ENABLING AA in the Nvidia control panel.

    The in game AA looks odd and sort of blurry to me, so I forced AA through the control panel instead, and while it has less visual effect than in other games, it does look a good deal better. The HUGE difference though was the FPS BOOST it gave me, I tried turning it on and off again and noticed better framerates.

    Hovering above M city without any AA I got about 42 FPS average (nearly all on high besides draw distance sliders at 100%, no AA and low shadows). After turning on 4xAA in the control panel I logged into the same scene and got about 52 FPS average, I then turned it up to 8xAA and got about 55 FPS average. When I get home from work today I will try turning it further up, since getting better looks AND FPS is a rather sweet deal ;)

    Anyway I have noticed this in a few other games, and it seems to be caused by poor utilization of the GPU and too much stress on CPU's, so putting more load on the GPU actually serves as a carrot on a stick and makes the whole thing run im better harmony. One other game which had this for me at least is WAR, which much like CO got rather poor optimization.

    Even after the FPS boost there is still no way I can turn shadows to medium/high on my Geforce 9800GTX, apparently Cryptic can't code shadows without it killing 50% of the game performance...

    For reference my PC setup is:

    3,16 Core2Duo
    4 gigs RAm
    Geforce 9800GTX
    Vista 32 bit
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited August 2009
    Unfortunately I cannot get the nvidia control panel settings to hold for the game. Even setting up a custom profile for the gameclient.exe doesnt seem to make the settings take effect in the game. Dangit!
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited September 2009
    J3W wrote:
    Following this suggestions I turned AA in game to off, and set it at 16Q in the Nvidia control panel.

    Prior to this was getting average 20-30 fps, sometimes reaching 35.

    With this change in place, I went to 58-65 fps.

    Great work Wasabee!

    (I'm on a 9800GT)

    Is that the only setting you changed on the control panel?
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited September 2009
    I'd love to try the Antialiasing thing, but I can't get the NVidia control panel settings to apply to this game for the life of me. I've tried game profile, global settings, nhancer, bumping my drivers up, rolling my drivers back, running as admin, turning off desktop composition ... just about any random thing I could think of to try.

    I'm running NVidia Gforce 8800 GTS under vista. Any idea what the problem could be?
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    Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited September 2009
    Wasabee wrote:
    Something interesting I discovered was ENABLING AA in the Nvidia control panel.

    The in game AA looks odd and sort of blurry to me, so I forced AA through the control panel instead, and while it has less visual effect than in other games, it does look a good deal better. The HUGE difference though was the FPS BOOST it gave me, I tried turning it on and off again and noticed better framerates.

    Hovering above M city without any AA I got about 42 FPS average (nearly all on high besides draw distance sliders at 100%, no AA and low shadows). After turning on 4xAA in the control panel I logged into the same scene and got about 52 FPS average, I then turned it up to 8xAA and got about 55 FPS average. When I get home from work today I will try turning it further up, since getting better looks AND FPS is a rather sweet deal ;)

    Anyway I have noticed this in a few other games, and it seems to be caused by poor utilization of the GPU and too much stress on CPU's, so putting more load on the GPU actually serves as a carrot on a stick and makes the whole thing run im better harmony. One other game which had this for me at least is WAR, which much like CO got rather poor optimization.

    Even after the FPS boost there is still no way I can turn shadows to medium/high on my Geforce 9800GTX, apparently Cryptic can't code shadows without it killing 50% of the game performance...

    For reference my PC setup is:

    3,16 Core2Duo
    4 gigs RAm
    Geforce 9800GTX
    Vista 32 bit

    OMG, this works so well. I got a jump from 35-40FPS to around 60+stable and sometimes at 85+FPS. Thanks for the advice. I have everything set to its maximum value. Although right now I can see some jagged edges, it still beats having slow downs, now it runs soo smooth.

    Here are my specs

    3.80 i7 965
    6GB RAM
    2 x GTX 295s
    Vista 64bit
    1920x1200 res

    I thought my PC would be able to handle anything for now. But apparently it cannot handle AA too well. Thanks for the info though. Oh and it does not matter if I have my AA at 2x or 8x, I get the same FPS the moment I turn it on. It drops from 80FPS to 35-40FPS, that is cutting the performance down in half.

    Actually an update, in MC I am still getting 35-40 FPS
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