I am seriously astounded to how much work has gone into that guide. The fact that you can even have "interactive comparisons" for all kinds of frametargets is seriously impressive. As for the adaptive frametargets themselves, I did not see a meaningful drop in visual IQ with or without. The grass was just touched up a bit less and there were a smidgen less smoke. But you'd
never notice that in-game.
TF2 is indeed well-optimised as far as IQ goes. HBAO is a huge performance sink, no surprise there. I was surprised, however, by the
significant difference between 4x MSAA and TSAA in terms of IQ. Performance-wise there was also a significant delta.
Given that TSAA looks better than 4x MSAA, the gap between them is fairly huge. Just goes to show how badly MSAA has aged and how much in need of a new standardised AA-technique we are.