I'll make a quick benchmark for you
1280x1024, 4xSGSSAA,
vs.
1920x1080, 8xMSAA
I spent a
good 2 minutes looking at those screenshots and could barely notice any difference. You can put lipstick on a pig but it still looks like a pig. Unless you can't stand any texture aliasing, the 1080P 8x MSAA still looks pretty much the same (i.e., regardless of type of AA, the game is still not good looking). For 99.9% of users, Super Sampling is
not a selling point to upgrade videocards.
You can put 32x SGSSAA if you want, but it isn't fixing sub-part animations, poor textures up close and lack of more realistic shaders and low polygon character models in SKYRIM. The gameplay is awesome, but the graphics are 6 or 7 out of 10
at best imho. Super Sampling does not make this game prettier or more realistic. It still has average graphics. Look at that 2D vegetation....
I'd much much rather take a next generation engine with 0AA.
The progress in graphics will come once objects have 100x more polygons, far more realistic shadows, much more complex shaders and objects behave in a realistic fashion with life-like physics effects (where water and wind are realistic too).
Adding 10000x Super Sampling will not add realism to an unrealistic looking game, crippled by an obsolete animation engine.
I'm not downing people with high end rigs with this post, but I want to know why people will spend $1000 on a set of video cards for games that will not utilize them for a a good 3-4 years?
I pretty much agree to an extent. The graphics innovation isn't what's driving many of us to upgrade, it's more about playing with new hardware or getting more performance at the same level of graphics.
I like to upgrade at the end of a generation when previous high-end cards come down in price enough and/or new generation of games are out so I can actually use the extra performance (unless I can get a cheap deal on a card). I wouldn't upgrade just to go from 2x AA to 16x AA or to go from High to Ultra settings. Seeing that BF3 failed to make modern cards unplayable (unless you must have 4x MSAA), I am probably going to wait until a wave of 4-5 next generation DX11 games comes out and pushes the envelope to the point where I have to reduce settings to Low / Medium to achieve playability.
SKYRIM isn't even as good looking as
Witcher 2, but even Witcher 2 still doesn't look
amazing, not amazing enough to spend $1000 on GPUs. The last time I was excited to upgrade my graphics card for when Crysis came out. Ever since then, there has been barely any improvements in graphics. 4+ years of stagnation!! BF3 is better than original Crysis, but since it's been 4 years, wouldn't you have expected graphics to improve dramatically in that span of time?
Also, sure OP's monitor has very low resolution, but going from 1280x1024 to 1080P by itself doesn't magically game the graphics look much better. It adds more FOV due to 16:9 orientation. However, higher resolution actually makes crappy textures look even worse.
We need a revolution in graphics like
Unreal Samaritan Demo that needed 3x GTX580s to run at 30 fps.
Right now, pretty much all of the performance of a high end GPU is used up NOT on more advanced shaders, physics/particle or texture effects -- instead it's mostly used up by inefficient deferred MSAA implementations in games or people running 2560x1600 monitors or by us having to use Tessellation in games like Metro 2033.
Even BF3 at Ultra without 4x MSAA runs blazingly fast on a single HD6950.
Sure, we can always have more performance, but revolution in graphics since Crysis has not occurred. Once 28nm GPUs launch, even BF3 with 4x MSAA will fall by the wayside. And then,
unless next generation DX11 games arrive, we'll again enter a period of stagnation, prob. until 2013-2014.
Problem is by the time the next demanding game arrives such as Metro Last Light, we'll have 28nm GPUs with even more performance. Software has little chance of catching up unless developers invest a lot more $ into games or next generation of consoles launch with DX11 GPUs and the industry makes DX11 a standard.
* I still get excited about new hardware, but would like for PC graphics to evolve quicker.
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