Quote Originally Posted by tymora View Post
I believe AO isn't hardware optimized under DX9 which is what the current game engine is based on. Will need DX10+ or 11 (don't remember which) for it.
It has nothing to do with that most likely. From what I know, there are so many parameters in an AO implementation that can be set to suboptimal values that it's pretty easy to mess things up. Most frequent mistake, according to my prof, is setting the count of samples to look for occlusion to a too high value, which results in huge performance issues. Which reminds me of what FFXIV's AO does :P