NVIDIA’s GeForce 290.36 Driver Adds AO Support to MW3 & Skyrim

With the onslaught of game releases recently, NVIDIA’s driver team sure have their work cut out for them. For the second time this month, NVIDIA has just released a brand-new beta driver that not only improves performance in a number of games, but also adds the ability to enable Ambient Occlusion shadowing techniques in two current ones; The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

Unlike most of the tweaking settings available in NVIDIA’s drivers, the enabling of AO has only been made available for those above-mentioned games. It seems that this is an effect that needs NVIDIA’s hands-on efforts to produce, rather than one that can be applied to any game you own. If you’re a player of either one of these games though, it’s worth checking out the URL below as there are many comparison shots that show the effect off well.

Ambient Occlusion support in Skyrim

While enabling AO is the ideal option, NVIDIA admits that there will be a performance hit involved, and given that many of the changes are subtle overall, it’ll be for you to decide whether the changes are worth it. Given that Modern Warfare 3 isn’t that demanding, chances are a performance hit would be much less noticeable there.

Aside from that addition, 290.36 enables NVIDIA Surround support on the X79 platform, includes updated SLI profiles for Crysis 2, Heroes and Generals, Inversion, Stronghold 3 and Syndicate, and at the same time adds or improves 3D Vision profiles for a number of games, including Sonic Generations and Modern Warfare 3.

This driver is still considered a beta, so install with caution. Overall though, it looks to be one of the most packed NVIDIA driver releases that we’ve seen in some time.