Better visual quality-FSAA or higher resolution?

[dbal]

The title says it all and I would be very interested in listening your experience in that...! After all it's the very first time that my vid card allows me to think about this dilemma...! 🙂

 

[rogue1979]

I usually play 1024 x 768 at 4X FSAA. I have found that at 1600 x 1200 FSAA isn't really needed.

 

[BFG10K]

High resolution all the way. Go as high as you can go and crank up the detail levels on full. Then if you've got fillrate to burn start cranking up the anisotropic filtering.

I never use FSAA unless I've got games that are limited to low resolutions.

 

[dbal]

Nice scaling BFG-point is that my Philips monitor supports only 60hz @1280x1024. Should I stick to 1024x768@85hz and turn on everything (including FSAA,aniso etc.) because of this? Is the refresh rate in gaming of any other importance other than the eyestrain? (granted that vsync is off)
Thanx!

 

[Mem]

Anisotropic filtering on and no FSAA is what I use,I mainly game at 1152x864,even in lower res with some games I never use FSAA ,was not impressed with it the few times I did try it and I`m talking about the visual image .

 

[dbal]

It's true that I haven't concluded yet but today I first saw MOHAA under 1280x1024 and I was totally astonished!! :Q Everything looks like photo quality (aniso on as well) and I play around 30-60fps ingame! Don't know if FSAA would add more since the performance hit on my GWARD GF2Ti would be great, but YES-Gaming in high resolutions is really unbeatable!

 

[Rick67]

I think it depends on the refresh rate of your monitor. I wouldn't want to play at high resolutions if I can only get a 60Hz refresh rate. I play all my games @ 1024x768, 100Hz refresh, 4x FSAA, and 8x anosotropic. If my monitor could handle 80Hz at the highest res then I would drop the FSAA and go that way.

 

[dbal]

Yep Rick your point is exactly the other side of the hill that causes our dilemma....
But how about what Anand writes for today's FSAA in Parhelia first look: "To put it plain and simple, anti-aliasing (AA) as it is done today is not very elegant at all. The vast majority of pixels that are fed through the anti-aliasing engines in GPUs don't even fall along the edge of a polygon and thus they aren't creating any visible jagged lines."
So, maybe FSAA is a wasted performance hit compared to higher resolutions (despite the refresh rate issue) regarding visual quality??
I mean, you could be playing much higher than 1024, with a smaller perf. penalty than applying FSAA (for no significant visual diff.) and the same image quality-all in a very decent refresh rate on a Sony monitor....
Don't know, I think that with a good monitor selecting higher resolutions is optimal-trouble is at 60Hz like in my case....🙂

 

[Instagib]

Higher Res all the way.

 

[BFG10K]

Should I stick to 1024x768@85hz and turn on everything (including FSAA,aniso etc.) because of this?

Can you do 1152 x 864 x 75 Hz? If you can that's the way to go. You want a 75 Hz refresh rate as a minimum at all times.

Run the highest resolution you can without dropping below 75 Hz and then when you reach it start cranking up the graphics options in your games to full and increasing ansitropic filtering as high as it'll go. When you reach the maximums in both situations and the game's still fast enough for you, try using FSAA a little bit and see how you like it.

Is the refresh rate in gaming of any other importance other than the eyestrain? (granted that vsync is off)

Yes it is important and not just from the angle of eye strain. The most obvious reason is that with 60 Hz you can only ever display 60 discrete frames per second. In a FPS that's a real killer especially for mouse sensitivity.

So, maybe FSAA is a wasted performance hit compared to higher resolutions (despite the refresh rate issue) regarding visual quality??

Absolutely. In my experience this is exactly the case; FSAA generally incurs much larger performance hits than raising the resolution plus the image quality gets blurrier. High resolution adresses all of the problems that FSAA addresses and handles other things like rendering accuracy at long distances and sharpness, something that FSAA doesn't address.

 

[dbal]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
The most obvious reason is that with 60 Hz you can only ever display 60 discrete frames per second.

is that true even with vsync off???