Question about FSAA on my Geforce DDR.

[Mears]

I was wondering whether or not I should enable it. Does it really that much of a difference in quality. From what I've read, it really slows down the FPS. If I do enable it, which quality selection would you recommend. Thanks.

 

[JellyBaby]

It varies from game to game. For 3D shooters like Quake 3 there's a performance hit and there's little reason to enable fsaa because you're not focusing on the scenery.

For simulations there is *no* performace hit if you're in a cpu-limited game. So throw up the fsaa to max and let 'er rip. If you're video card limited there will be a performance hit. Either way it may improve the visuals enough to make it worthwhile.

These are generalizations. Your results may vary. Void where prohibited.

 

[PNF2]

FSAA is too much of a drain of framerate. I find that it's much nicer to just play at a higher resolution, and get more fps. The only way i'd suggest FSAA in OpenGL, is if you set the quality to the minimum-medium, and run at around 640x480-800x600. It really depends on how powerfull your system is. I can run at 640x480 max quality FSAA, and get around 100fps, but there are things that bring it down, and having non consisten fps is very annoying. FSAA isn't very great, unless you stop, zoom in, and stare at the edge of something. Extra eye candy is nice, but not when it slows you down a lot.

 

[Goi]

Not on a GeForce DDR...too slow

 

[BenSkywalker]

The overwhelming majority of the time I would say that double the res, or higher res depending on what FSAA setting you are using, is better. There are some exceptions for instance NFS4 High Stakes looks much better with FSAA on, the aliasing of the lines on the road and the texture shimmering are horrible and FSAA does make a large improvement, better then higher res.

Don't believe that you GF DDR isn't fast enough, under certain circumstances you can hit over 200FPS with FSAA on, though you won't hit close to that at normal res or with more demanding games, many older games, all that I have tried are plenty playable with FSAA on. Here is a rundown on the performance I hit with the Det2 5.22 drivers in a variety of games-

http://www.crosswinds.net/~benskywalker/fsaa.htm