It depends on what AA filter you have set. Standard Box filtering looks somewhat better than the game's standard AA at the same level, and there's absolutely no difference in performance. With Edge Detection, it looks so much better than Box, but it performs a little worse than it or the game's.

You guys with NVIDIA cards are still better off though. After all, you can have like 32x AA if you wanted. I can only go up to about 8x. And I think you have better AA techniques than I do as well.

Alright, thanks that makes sense.

Turning on AA transparency and Gamma Correction is almost always better than just increasing the number of multisamples. Unless you've got a brand new 5 grand machine that can get away with running super sampling at a worthwhile level of course, then those settings become irrelevant.

Ah nice one thanks. I've been waiting for nhancer to get updated for a while, but that tool looks just as good. Well at least if you know what your doing, it's certainly not as noob friendly as nhancer but it does the job.

Forcing ambient occlusion on is about a milion times better than the mod but it's still not perfect, having said that it's close enough that I think I'll use it. It has a slight issue with aliasing, check out the inside of her left arm in the screen shot (her left, right are as your looking at it) but it's not bad enough to be distracting. There's also some fairly obvious shimmer with complicated shapes, like grass and animals with fur, but it's tolerable when it makes static objects look so nice. The shimmer can be toned down by cranking up the levels of AO but this has an exponential negative effect on performance.

Ambient Occlusion On http://lh5.ggpht.com/_z1odMghQc7A/TNRG0LEY_9I/AAAAAAAAAHw/ZN7tRdRPNy4/s1152/ScreenShot35.jpg, http://lh3.ggpht.com/_z1odMghQc7A/TNRHL4W7LoI/AAAAAAAAAIA/o5q1diFg_Zw/s1152/ScreenShot33.jpg
Ambient Occlusion Off http://lh6.ggpht.com/_z1odMghQc7A/TNRGvx86cYI/AAAAAAAAAHs/USjGTa0vrjc/s1152/ScreenShot37.jpg, http://lh3.ggpht.com/_z1odMghQc7A/TNRHRxJzl9I/AAAAAAAAAIE/38E3tqh440o/s1152/ScreenShot32.jpg

It'll cost you about 10 FPS, depending on the hardware obviously

o.0 howd you get that? It says that AO isnt supported in Nvidia control panel.

Grab the nVidia Inspector tool mentioned above.

Don't get too excited, it looks heaps better in screenshots than it does in the actual game, but here's how you do it step by step.

1 - Download http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=330715
2 - Run it and then click the little box on the right next to Driver Version called "Driver Profile Settings"
3 - In the new window click the button second from the right at the top that's says "Create a desktop shorcut for more advanced elevated settings mode"
4 - Run the shortcut from your desktop
5 - In the Profiles menu of this new window find Fallout New Vegas, if it doesn't exist then skip to step 7
6 - Remove the executables from the New Vegas profile
7 - Find the Fallout 3 profile and add the New Vegas executables to it
8 - In the Fallout 3 profile find the Ambient Occlusion settings in the common tab and turn "Ambient Occlusion Usage" on and set the "Ambient Occlusion Performance" (the Performance setting looks pretty ropey)

You could achieve the same by just altering the New Vegas profile, but this way is a little less complicated.

I'm glad I could help in my own small way. Still, I think the effect is too subtle to justify the fps hit, but I DO only use a GTS 250.

I'm only using a 260 and I'm losing about 15 FPS (from a cap of around 65ish on Ultra 1680x1050) max for High Quality

Edit - I should clarify that I don't think that's an unreasonable hit.