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Anti Aliasing

C

ComatoseDelirium

Senior member
Ahh im getting a new video card a 6600 gt agp, and I was wondering how anti aliasing works, what does it improve? what penalities are their? is it worth it with my cpu? its a AMD 2700 XP, i know its already bottle necked lol.
 
It smooths out diagonal lines. It puts an extra load on the card, and so framerate will be lower, but you're always making a tradeoff between performance and image quality anyway. Personally I prefer all my games with 4xaa/8xaf, and my 9800p will push most in 10x7 or 12x10 with those settings and full eye candy. I don't think your CPU figures into it, it's a function of the card.
 
No temp difference really, since you can't go past "full load" on the card no matter what, something you can hit without AA.
 
It all depends. AA is a graphical extra you can turn on for games, but it causes extra work for the graphics card. If you card isn't already working at a full load, it's effectively "free" while if it's already bogged down, then it will cut back on your frame rates a bit.
 
ut is a good example of AA use.

the game is very cpu sensitive...the actuall graphics arent a problem at all since its only dx7/8 level, but the physics etc what the cpu has to deal with brings fps well under 100 specially in onslaught.

so ur graphics maybe capable of say 150FPS rendering the graphics, but ur cpu may only be able to push the calculations at say 60FPS, so basically u have 90FPS that u just aint gonna see, so u can put on a little AA and AF, this will bring down the graphics FPS to say 100FPS, but ur cpu is still only doing 60FPS, therefore u dont see any performance difference, and it looks better....so we can effectively call it FREE

as graphics cards produce square pixels, when u make a diagnol line out of these as u can imagine they have a jagged edge, AA seeks to remove these edges by multisampling the final pixels to smoothe them out
 
You really want a good balance of image quality and performance. Without the balance there is really no point in buying new hardware. I shoot for an average of anywhere between 60-80 FPS in my games with maximum details with at least some AA/AF. It's almost like a chemistry experiment. The screen resolution is your base, while AA/AF are your active compounds.

In other words....just play around with it. Some games really need AA, like HL2. Some others don't. Like Doom 3 in high resolution. So some games it's not worth the performance penalty leaving AA or AF on.
 
Simply put, AA makes it look like you are running a game at a higher resolution than you actually are.

For example, 800x600 resolution, with 2x AA, supposedly makes it look like 1600X1200, this isn't really the case though, as I would much rather run my games at 1600x1200 no AA rather than 1024x768 with AA.
 
With the newer games like HL2, I found that gaming was nicer at 1600x1200 versus 1024x768 @ 4XAA 16XAF. Although you do have some alaising at 1600x1200, the overall image is much crisper esp. if you have a decent sized display. Since I only have a 9800Pro I was not able to try 1600x1200 @ 4xAA 16xAF which would be a beautiful gaming experience.
 
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