The new Nvidia 185.20 Forceware allows real-time Ambient Occlusion in games.
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=80520If you don't know what this is, this is what can be done with it:

Of course FS2 would really benefit from this. Especially the bigger ships, with a lot of texture tiling.
It already be used in some games. I don't know how that works, but it looks like you can somehow force it in the driver and it works in some games.
Anyway, I've been told that it doesn't work in DX9. So you need DX10 games to use it.
Well, now I'd like to know if this could be by any chance supported by a new OpenGL extension and used in FS2.