one, the article is 14 years old. two, the point of ambient occlusion was not about making geometry look good, it was about making lighting look good.
replyThe main issue it solved was normal lighting at odds with the world, it was for fast general approximation of global illumination.
I think the prime example of SSAO being helpful was Fallout 3. FO3 has very simplistic lighting even for its time, kind of looking like "fullbright"/non-shaded mode in Source engine. SSAO, when it was added as a graphics driver feature, suddenly gave interiors depth that they were severely lacking, and while it didn't always look "realistic", it almost always looked much better than without.
replyWhen I look around me at my actual room it feels like if I saw it accurately depicted in a video game I'd call it lacking depth. The walls are flat colors, and there's barely anything delineating the wall from the ceiling - only a slight change in the light intensity. I know it's there and I have binocular vision, but by raw pixels, there isn't much to tell them apart. It may be that such things have to be exaggerated to get across through the medium of a game, like how cartoon characters always have to squish and stretch when they jump to make it obvious that they are jumping.
replyCrysis was the first, if you remember it. It changed FPS’ forever, introduced some new open world mechanics, as well as being the first game to utilize SSAO.
replyAnother point of context: at the time, several popular games had used a very exaggerated and/or poorly implemented ambient occlusion feature. I personally would frequently turn it off entirely because it was generally expensive (even if not as expensive as full global illumination) and looked bad.
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