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Happy New Year + NVidia’s Ambient Occlusion

Happy new year guys, quite exciting to have yet another year pass and once again, personally having the frustration of still thinking it’s 2008 :(.

Anyway, in some other news I just found out about some new NVidia drivers. They’re not yet listed on NVidia’s official site as they’re leaked versions (then again, perfectly legal). The new 185.20 drivers. Another driver release, the typical improvements? Nah, a bit more than that:

Half Life 2 Comparison

Open these in two seperate tabs to see real differences:

Call of Duty 4 - ON

Call of Duty 4 – ON

Call of Duty 4 - OFF

Call of Duty 4 – OFF

Some people have reported quite a few major FPS boosts in certain games but I haven’t really gotten any real proof of it so you’ll just have to try it out.

However, another cool feature about the new drivers is Ambient Occlusion. This has been seen before in games such as Crysis, but now NVidia has brought it onto a global scale so you can now have it in most games.

What does it do? Why don’t you have a look:

Yet ANOTHER new feature is SLI Anti-Aliasing. People with more than one card active in their computer will now have discovered the new pure SLI Anti-Aliasing mode which turns one of your two or more graphics card into pure Anti-Aliasing power, now allowing users to reach 32xQaa or with quad sli, 64xQaa!

This has also been reported to be the first official Windows 7 drivers, though unfortunately Ambient Occlusion currently only works for Vista users, so even I can’t yet enjoy these new features.

Downloads:

**Vista/Windows 7 (32 bit)

Vista (64 bit)

XP (32 bit)

XP (64 bit)**