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Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 03:57
by Predator.v2
As nobody seems to be reading the "Tech Support" forums, i gonna post my results here too. :P

I kept trying, i am have finally found a way to enable Ambient Occlusion via Nvidia Inspector.
You gotta use the "Ambient Occlusion compatility" mode "Fallout 3" and turn Ambient Occlusion setting to "High Quality" and the Ambient Occlusion usage to "Enabled".

I have even played around with Anisotropic Filtering x16 (for improved texture quality) and 8x Spare Grid Super Antialiasing, Texture filtering - LOD Bias -1.5 (for stuff like vegetation, fences, ...) and got some satisfying results, although the differences are subtle.
I gonna provide a few comparison screenshots (raw = BF2 high settings without above mentioned), maybe i gonna write a short tutorial about this:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/106806270/Ambi ... lusion.zip

Preview:

RAW:
Image

AO Quality:
Image

RAW:
Image

AO Quality:
Image

RAW:
Image

AO Quality:
Image

Image

Image

WARNING: This will have a impact on your frame rate. I have turned down the AO to "Qualty" instead of "High Quality". Gives a better frame rate and looks a bit more realistic. "High Quality" is a bit too much shadow drawing.

EDIT:
I moved to just Super Sampling Antialiasing x8 for "Transparency AA", which looks way better when moving around instead of on stationary screenshots. And i even got some decent fps improvements with just "Quality" instead of "High Quality" as stated above. Right now, the the fps decrease isn't just as significant as before, but i still get a way better graphics result than with "default high settings".

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 05:12
by LITOralis.nMd
What GPU are you using?
What Nvidia drivers are you using?

Any problems with motion blur?

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 06:42
by Pvt.LHeureux
Could you post a short video? Cause seeing this in fluid gameplay would look much better than screenshots

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 07:26
by cyberzomby
Hmmm! Looks kind of nice. Some screens look a bit weird. Gonna have to check it out for myself as well! Lotoralis, can you enable motion blur there as well! :o Sounds cool ^_^ ! Got a GTX 670 myself. What card are you using? Did you experience more CTD's or something?

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 11:01
by Elirah
Dude, that is awesome.
I took Dragon Age 2 Ambient Occlusion (was by default?) at that didnt work. Have to try it with Fallout version.
Nice to know that :D
And super sparse grid thing is a huge framerate killer, though it looks really awesome!

Edit: Since when did PR got motion blur?

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 11:13
by Phoenixo_Idaho
Nice work !

Please can you make, as l'Heureux said, a little video to show us the impact in gameplay and fluidity ? :)

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 11:28
by Philrow
Would it be possible to run this on normal servers, without getting any trouble with PB etc.?

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 11:51
by ChallengerCC
Cool i need to try this out. If i could play PR in 3D also it would be stunning.
I hope they fix the PR.exe crash when starting with TriDef.

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 15:07
by Predator.v2
No problems with PB so far, no crashs so far, but i have just started yesterday with these settings.
Haven't noticed any motion blur effects at BF2. ;)

My GPU is a ASUS Nvidia 560ti - 448 (OC: 800Mhz)
CPU: Q9550 (OC: 4 x 3.6Ghz)
RAM: 8GB DDR2 (800Mhz)
SSD: OCZ Vertex 4 (PR installed on the SSD)
Latest Nvidia Beta Drivers 313.96

With Spare Grid SSAA and Ambient Occlusion on "High Quality" i had a significant fps drop by around 30-50% but with only Super Sampling 8x (for Transparency AA) and "Quality" AO it seems to be around 0-30%. Plus "Quality" AO looks better for me (Top six screenshots are with "Quality" AO).

I'll see, if i can take a short video. Although PB keeps kicking me, due to my old fraps version...

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 15:18
by Elirah
AO Algorithms are pretty optimised, so they wont drop framerate very much. Super Sparse Grid Sample is pretty badass though, and that the effect super sparse grid sample had was never intended that way it is :D
Thats a funny fact though. As nvidia said, they fixed the behavior, but the majority said that the mistake they made was much better than the intended one.
However, super sparse gridsample is not that optimised, so its a huge framerate killer :D

PB however doesnt even notice what nvidia inspector does, so you never get any problem with pb while use AO.
It isnt even an advantage to have AO, just looks better than normal.

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 15:29
by Adriaan
Awesome, nice work looking into this! Will give it a try myself.

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 16:06
by Predator.v2
While i was trying to record a short demo video, i noticed my BF2 shadows are really crappy. Very "pixelated" and low quality. I reverted everything back to normal, deleted the BF2 cache but still low quality shadows (nothing to do with AO, just objects shadows).

I have read this seems to be a general problem of new graphic drivers, but does anyone know a solution?

Image

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 16:22
by Elirah
Predator.v2 wrote:While i was trying to record a short demo video, i noticed my BF2 shadows are really crappy. Very "pixelated" and low quality. I reverted everything back to normal, deleted the BF2 cache but still low quality shadows (nothing to do with AO, just objects shadows).

I have read this seems to be a general problem of new graphic drivers, but does anyone know a solution?
NOPE, thats the way how BF2 does dynamic shadows.
In a different angle the shadow looks good, and in another angle it just looks worse...
Nothing you can do about and nvidia inspector didnt do any changes to that.
Dont know about BF3 though, but until BF3 Dice never managed to make nonpixaleted dynamic shadows.

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 19:58
by zombie-yellow
I wonder if we could write an open letter to DICE to ask them if they can do some updates to the engine and BF2 in general lol

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 20:26
by AfterDune
LOL, not gonna happen, bro ;) .

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 21:11
by sweedensniiperr
zombie-yellow wrote:I wonder if we could write an open letter to DICE to ask them if they can do some updates to the engine and BF2 in general lol
[R-DEV]AfterDune wrote:LOL, not gonna happen, bro ;) .
why not do it anyway?

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 21:13
by zombie-yellow
Worth a try I should say. And let everybody sign it lol

All the community of the most active mods like PR, FH2, etc... would be awesome :)

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 21:19
by Phoenixo_Idaho
I'll give a try to this ! :)

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-19 22:14
by JimmyKid1996
If someone does this, I would sign it in a heartbeat.

Re: Ambient Occlusion for PR: Battlefield 2

Posted: 2013-02-20 06:32
by Arab
JimmyKid1996 wrote:If someone does this, I would sign it in a heartbeat.
Me too.