Quote - If ever stewer and I seem to contradict, believe stewer. He is the guy who wrote the renderer for SM. (In case you didn't know)

I thought I said in the other thread that light-based AO would be ignored automatically, and material-based should be removed.

I think I didn't make myself clear. Remove AO on shaders. The reason why I didn't make the renderer do it automatically is because there are few, very few cases where AO can be used for procedural patterns and I wanted those cases to get correct indirect light. I think I've seen a few shaders from Ajax doing that, but not anyone else's.

Oh, and Operaguy: that is an insane number of pixel samples. Taking it down to 3-9 should give you identical renders in less time.