GEForce4 with or without anti-aliasing

[zrider]

The mfg spec say hardware implemented anti-aliasing multi-sampling techqniques. I'm a dummy and confused. What exactly does anti-aliasing do and what are the real world visible benefits? What difference would one actually see between card with and one without?

 

[DefRef]

AA smoothes out the "jaggies" in an image that occur when lines aren't perfectly vertical or horizontal, resulting in a "stair-step" appearance. AA fills in the gaps and smoothes things out. Fact-paced shooter games don't really need it, but racing games, flight sims or anything that you have time to really stare at benefit greatly. The difference between AA and non-AA visuals in THPS3 was shocking.

I'm sure someone else will post links to somewhere with examples.

 

[Blurry]

If you set your resolution high enough you won't need Anti Aliasing

 

[moocat]

I have to agree that AA doesn't have as much impact at 1600x1200. It came down to a choice between Anistropic and AA and I chose Anistropic. The combo of both was too much of a performance hit (I'm using a Radeon 8500).

However, with the GF4 you should be able to use both and still get good framerate...at least you ought to be able to for that kind of $$$.

 

[BFG10K]

FSAA smooths out the jagged edges and the crawling effect although this costs you in terms of overall image sharpness. In general I prefer to use high resolution over FSAA because it does everything FSAA does plus it sharpens the image and increases the rendering accuracy as well.

 

[zrider]

Thanks for the input. The longer i be here the dumber i get. What is "anistropic"?