Houston, nVidia created a problem - Ambient Occlusion

[UndeadD3vi1]

Ambient Occlusion, a new feature in the latest nVidia Driver kills Stero 3D in some games.
For more info on Ambient Occlusion click here

This seems to have different effects on different games via different S3D Drivers. (Both iz3D and nVidia Driver are affected by it!)

Games I've Tested so far:
* Fallout 3 - Completly broken with nVidia Driver, gun renders fine but everything else is weird. iz3D driver renders fine, however performance is unplayable. (Its fine without AO enabled)
* Unreal Tournament 3 - Completly broken with nVidia Driver, seems to show a non-textured, non-movable version of the 3D world.
* Call of Duty 5 - Allmost all of game world turns white on nVidia S3D. Trees seem to be a exception. (Sprites?)

[cybereality]

Ambient occlusion (AO) is just a lighting model and theres nothing about it that inherently is incompatible with stereo3d. Its not anything particularly new either, a number of games have used it before and still work with S3D like Crysis. Nvidia has just gone and retro-actively added AO into games that weren't originally made for it. My guess is that they are using screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) which is an approximation of the real algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Spa ... _Occlusion" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). With SSAO the whole screen is rendered to a texture and the lighting is extracted from the depth buffer. This image is then super-imposed over the scene in a final post-processing step. This is likely what is breaking the stereo3D. Again, this is nothing new. Post-processing effects, like HDR, have been wreaking havok on 3D drivers since programmable shaders hit the scene. I don't know if there is a work-around. I guess just keep it disabled until Nvidia fixes their 3D driver.

[UndeadD3vi1]

Its not the nVidia implementation of it per-say, its the nVidia Stereo Driver that has the issue as iz3D Driver looks even better with AO. (Fallout 3 FPS goes to hell though)

I guess the next Stereo Driver release will fix it.