Recent nVidia drivers have a configurable settings which some
gamers have been using to see through smoke in CoD4. Specifically, the
culprit seems to be "Ambient Occlusion". Setting it on makes the player able to "see" through any thrown smoke - making its use less effective.
Anything post 185 will have Ambient Occlusion (AO) available: currently, nVidia drivers are at version 190.38. AO is available on nVidia 9 series cards and up; however, workarounds for 8 series cards are available.
This
phenomenon has been discussed on tek-9.org forum posts and is now a
very hot topic everywhere CoD4 online competition is discussed.
We asked Trivve, Promod Live v2 team member about this, knowing that he has been busy trying to figure a way to use his competitive CoD4 mod to detect the setting:
"We have investigated it quite a lot and got to the conclusion that
it's nothing that can't be fixed mod-wize. It's up to IW/PB to fix it
the settings for AO is stored in the windows registry (for each game)
so scanning the registry should do the trick.
there are also global AO settings too." - Trivve
It appears therefore that Punkbuster may be the only solution to prevent players from switching Ambient Occlusion on to provide themselves an advantage. PB is aware of the issue and hopefully they will act.
Speaking of PB, they have been very busy since Netcoders (a known cheat making site) was hacked a few weeks ago. They have revamped their code and now, they are sporting a new process. In addition to Punkbuster A and B...there's now "K". See this discussion here.
