Does it bother a lot of people to play w/filtering optimizations and w/o aa?

[RussianSensation]

As toyota noted, AF has a huge impact on ground/floor texture quality. With modern videocards, AF is at 16x is almost free. Even AF at 8x is excellent. To me, AF > AA.

If I am struggling for performance, out of everything, I turn off AA first, then I lower the shadow quality to Medium. Then if I still need more performance, I start tweaking here and there, depending on the game. Post processing effects often reduce FPS a lot but don't add too much to visuals. Motion blur often makes the game less enjoyable too.

But I'd rather play any game maxed out (i.e., SSAO/HBAO, highest particle effects, best shadows, highest draw distance, highest character / model detail) with 0AA, then have it running with 4xAA and having to reduce details/texture quality in a game.

 

[lehtv]

Yep, unless the game forces me to drop resolution to get food framerate online.

I'm looking at you Battlefield 3...grrr lol

No but yeah it's the same for me, I had to downgrade to 1600x900 to make BF3 beta run 60fps smooth at medium-high on my PC. The retail probably runs better

 

[Silverforce11]

AA is almost as important to me as polygon count, or texture resolution, or lighting effects. I usually turn off post processing effects like motion blur, depth of field, post-processing AA. They just eat performance while making the game actually look worse.

I turn off motion blur and DoF because they suck for performance but also because they look BAD and ruin my peripheral vision in online games.

Recently in DeusEx and BF3, i like post AA, turning it on has almost no performance loss and im seeing a big improvement in aliasing.

AF 16 is essential. Textures look washed out without it and its the biggest visual improvement, with modern cards, for almost no perf loss.

 

[blackened23]

Lower res + AA > Higher Res + No AA.

The end.

if High res means no AA, Id rather run a lower res.
I like the OP dont like jagged edges.

But again I agree, depends on the game. And how appernt a differnce AA makes (in some games hardly any, in others its night and day).

I don't think i'd ever opt for lower resolution, because non native resolutions on led/ips panels are either stretched or blurry. I'll agree with everyone else here in that AA is the first place to look if you're trying to tweak for more performance, while AF is generally free. There's still a huge performance hit for AA, especially if you opt for anything past 4x.

 

[boxleitnerb]

The very first thing I do after every driver installation is turning all AF-optimizations off and turn the quality to "very high" (Nvidia). Texture shimmering is just annoying. As for AA, I play with SGSSAA wherever I can, because it makes a huge difference in image quality. Polygon aliasing isn't the main problem nowadays, it's shader and texture aliasing/shimmering. I will never go back on image quality, that's for sure.

 

[arredondo]

Not 100% sure what AF does, but AA i don't care about, i've never used it.

Look at the two pics in Toyota's post (blow them up large). The floor in the top pic gets blurrier the deeper it goes into the distance. The one at the bottom looks much crisper.

 

[DirkGently1]

Post Processing and Motion Blur are the first things i sacrifice before turning down AA. I cannot abide Aliasing.

Anybody who can live with the first in this sequence of images, or say's they can't see the difference, needs their eyes testing:

 

[SirPauly]

The very first thing I do after every driver installation is turning all AF-optimizations off and turn the quality to "very high" (Nvidia). Texture shimmering is just annoying. As for AA, I play with SGSSAA wherever I can, because it makes a huge difference in image quality. Polygon aliasing isn't the main problem nowadays, it's shader and texture aliasing/shimmering. I will never go back on image quality, that's for sure.

Imho,

I do the same thing and couldn't agree more. Been talking about specular and shader aliasing with some of the very first titles that did exhibit this behavior -- Doom3 and Far Cry. Was very vocal at rage3d for ATI and AMD to offer super-sampled flexibility for their customer base and very close to ChrisRay and had his ear and many, many discussions about how super-sampled flexibility and transparency flexibility was very important to improving the gaming experience. Had the pleasure of talking with Blaire, that first discovered the SGSSAA setting for end-users. Improving texture artifacts is so very important and gamers with similar passions find each other.

Polygon aliasing has wonderful flexibility, with multi-sampling, CSAA, CFAA but with deferred rendering, kinda messed things up and new ways of trying to enhance IQ were needed.

With Shader and specular on the rise since the introductions of Doom3 and Far Cry -- smile, based on gamers and some sites noticing and the more vocal, more awareness --- developers and IHV's may spend resources to help alleviate this eye-soar. MLAA and FXAA are welcomed additions but hopefully quality and innovation may rise over time. Super-sampled flexibility is also very, very welcomed -- as is transparency flexibility,

The key is movement in a 3d space and the quality offered -- some gamers settle for good enough but appreciate a bit more gamers that don't -- because I believe more quality is what separates and differentiates the PC experiences and gamers are worth spending resources on.

There is no one way setting for all and why Flexibility is a gamer's best friend because our eyes differ based on our subjective tastes and tolerances.

 

[LoneNinja]

I play most games without AA, I'm too busy moving around to sit and stare at or notice jagged edges.

 

[Concillian]

Jaggies/aliasing is a result of individual pixels being visible to the naked eye. By making the pixels small enough(to where the naked human eye can't see them) you can completely eliminate aliasing/jaggies without needing any kind of AA algorithms at all regardless of the game.

It's about pixel per inch more than it is about resolution. You can increase resolution but that usually comes with increasing monitor size which negates the entire benefit of having a higher resolution if you are measuring display definition as PPI. A 2560x1600 30 inch monitor has about 100PPI, you need roughly triple that pixel density for the pixels to be small enough to eliminate aliasing/jaggies completely.

tl;dr: Higher resolution does contribute to getting rid of aliasing but common display technology for normal PCs isn't even close to reaching the level of pixel density that would completely eradicate aliasing/jaggies for good.

This.

People talk about higher resolution, but what they are really talking about is more pixels at the same resolution. Resolution is technically dots per unit area or pixels per unit area and monitors are all pretty similar in these terms, because people don't know how to change their font resolution and when they get an actual high resolution monitor, they freak out about how "the fonts are sooo small" and give the monitor bad ratings.

1024x or 2560x doesn't matter in today's monitors. Physical proximity of pixels is very close, so AA benefit is also very close.

Monitors haven't made substantial improvements in actual resolution in over 20 years.

 

[SirPauly]

I play most games without AA, I'm too busy moving around to sit and stare at or notice jagged edges.

Imho,

The key is when sitting and staring -- they're not as noticeable but aliasing is much more noticeable when moving. The key is to have a smooth image while moving so one can see clearly what is going on, for some, and why anti-aliasing methods are offered.

 

[Concillian]

Imho,

The key is when sitting and staring -- they're not as noticeable but aliasing is much more noticeable when moving. The key is to have a smooth image while moving so one can see clearly what is going on, for some, and why anti-aliasing methods are offered.

This was definitely an issue before AF became "free" (in terms of performance).

Whether it really matters for AA is really a game by game difference. It seems how the game looks or is made is a HUGE factor for me as far as whether I feel a need for AA or not.

Which is why I think this thread is a little odd. My experience is that game to game it matters a lot, so opinions in this thread are going to vary wildly as well. Of course you see those with "golden eyes" that neeed to run 8xAA in every game just to keep from gouging their own eyes out, as that's less painful than playing without AA in any game... you see those guys in every hardware forum. But if you ignore those, there's a pretty wide range of opinion in this thread, and I think that's normal and to be expected given how different games look with and without AA.

You cannot compare stills, because you don't play stills. How those stills mesh together matters. A lot of how much it matters is how high the contrast is on the edges. If the game has a lot of dark on light areas (jungle games) it can be pretty annoying. But if there's a lot of black on grey, or other dark on dark colors (FEAR, D3, etc...) there is often less need for AA as the jaggies, even though they're just as noticeable in stills, are not really that noticeable when you play the game.

 

[lavaheadache]

The higher the res, the less aliasing is apparent. It can also differ from game to game. In many games I can do without AA (@1920x1200), but in others I use it.

The size of the screen versus the resolution is really what is gonna dictate how bad aliasing is.

 

[lavaheadache]

This.

People talk about higher resolution, but what they are really talking about is more pixels at the same resolution. Resolution is technically dots per unit area or pixels per unit area and monitors are all pretty similar in these terms, because people don't know how to change their font resolution and when they get an actual high resolution monitor, they freak out about how "the fonts are sooo small" and give the monitor bad ratings.

1024x or 2560x doesn't matter in today's monitors. Physical proximity of pixels is very close, so AA benefit is also very close.

Monitors haven't made substantial improvements in actual resolution in over 20 years.

oops, you beat me to it

 

[SirPauly]

This was definitely an issue before AF became "free" (in terms of performance).

Whether it really matters for AA is really a game by game difference. It seems how the game looks or is made is a HUGE factor for me as far as whether I feel a need for AA or not.

Which is why I think this thread is a little odd. My experience is that game to game it matters a lot, so opinions in this thread are going to vary wildly as well. Of course you see those with "golden eyes" that neeed to run 8xAA in every game just to keep from gouging their own eyes out, as that's less painful than playing without AA in any game... you see those guys in every hardware forum. But if you ignore those, there's a pretty wide range of opinion in this thread, and I think that's normal and to be expected given how different games look with and without AA.

You cannot compare stills, because you don't play stills. How those stills mesh together matters. A lot of how much it matters is how high the contrast is on the edges. If the game has a lot of dark on light areas (jungle games) it can be pretty annoying. But if there's a lot of black on grey, or other dark on dark colors (FEAR, D3, etc...) there is often less need for AA as the jaggies, even though they're just as noticeable in stills, are not really that noticeable when you play the game.

Imho,

Strong lighting and color contrasts are where one may look to gauge quality. But, what happens if one is in a low color/lighting contrast area then all of a sudden one enters a strong lighting and color contrast area with-in a level or game?

The reason for more quality is for the areas that get more worse case and the gamer doesn't break gaming immersion for them. Obviously, this differs for each individual where no AA may be fine, x2 AA may be fine, x4, x8 or x8 with CSAA or CFAA --- each individual may have different subjective tastes and tolerances.

If someone desires to not use AA -- that's fine to me. But, what if the gamer does desire to use AA and desires more quality? It is great to have the choice to, for the individuals that may need the extra quality for their gaming immersion. There is no right or wrong way to play the game for all and why flexibility is so important to the PC platform.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Post Processing and Motion Blur are the first things i sacrifice before turning down AA. I cannot abide Aliasing.

Anybody who can live with the first in this sequence of images, or say's they can't see the difference, needs their eyes testing:

Half Life 2 was notorious for having very large problems with the fences "crawling". It's also such an old game that anyone with a half decent PC would turn 8x AA on and get 200fps lol. Some games benefit more than others from AA too. It's easy to post up extreme examples as well. On the flip side some games like BF3 really tank with AA turned on. Whether it's VRAM usage, the implementation, or whatever...I have to basically turn AA off to play the game with my GTX 295.

Battlefield 3 doesn't look too bad without AA but you could always point out extreme examples of where it would help for a split second. Personally I don't go looking for crawlies and jaggies over every object in a scene.

 

[lehtv]

It's also such an old game that anyone with a half decent PC would turn 8x AA on and get 200fps lol.

Actually, they would install Cinematic mod and get more like 60fps

 

[MrK6]

I've found that the resolution used makes a big difference in the impact that most image optimizations have for me. For example, on my desktop which has a 30" @ 2560x1600, and I generally turn off AA first if I'm not getting the FPS I want. The combination of the high resolution, sitting back further back (due to the 30" monitor), and actual movement in game play just doesn't make aliasing that apparent. I mean, I don't take screenshots and analyze them to validate whether I'm enjoying my gaming experience or not . There are some games where aliasing is horrendous due to the engine, and well, thank you AMD for making MLAA . I do, however, find that 16x AF has little performance impact but a big visual impact at 2560x1600 - texture blurring is very apparent when everything is that sharp. In the end, I like to leave all in-game visual quality options cranked in my games. If a game is still not giving playable FPS without AA, I'll turn off ambient occlusion or an advanced depth of field effect - something that is very subtle in its graphical enhancements but pays a big performance penalty.