Why can't sites benchmark with just 16xAF?

[GeneralGrievous]

We see 4x/8x benches and 0/0 benches. But pretty much every ATI owner enables 16x AF whenever they can, as it gives huge IQ increase with ~10% performance hit. Antialiasing is great and all, but it often comes with too high of a performance hit for anything but the latest cards, especially when compared to increasing the resolution.

It doesn't have to be for comparitive purposes (ATI would win just about every benchmark), but mainly for informative reasons.

 

[gururu]

i agree, i use 16x AF and no AA

General Grievous, does your XT do well with Truform enabled?

 

[GeneralGrievous]

I have no idea. Never used Trueform before, I don't even know what it does.

 

[duragezic]

Really? From the pics on the Rage3d FAQ I couldn't tell much of a difference with AF on but obviously 4x AA made it look much better.

Is the general consensus to have 16x AF and have a higher resolution than to use lesser resolution but have FSAA on??

 

[gururu]

for UT2004 you have to edit the ut2004.ini

change Npatches=False to NPatches=True.

must do it 2-3 times in the ini.

it adds far more detail to textures but was a killer performance hit on the 9700pro and 9800 series

 

[GeneralGrievous]

Is the general consensus to have 16x AF and have a higher resolution than to use lesser resolution but have FSAA on??

It is, at least on this forum. There's a thread around here, I'll link you to it.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=1348343&highlight_key=y&keyword1=aa

 

[ponyo]

I wouldn't mind seeing just 16xAF benches at 1600x1200 only either. At that resolution I don't really care about AA but I do like 8 or 16 AF. I just tried out FarCry today after receiving my A64 package and it ran smooth with just 16AF but not with 4AA. At 1600x1200, AF is far more important than AA, IMO.

 

[BFG10K]

Most likely it's because the GeForce 5 series is limited to 8x so they want to be able to compare them in a valid fashion. That's also why they use 4xAA - it's the common ground across cards and vendors.

 

[GeneralGrievous]

Most likely it's because the GeForce 5 series is limited to 8x so they want to be able to compare them in a valid fashion. That's also why they use 4xAA - it's the common ground across cards and vendors.

But even then you never see just 8xAF benches. It's always 0/0 or 4/8.

 

[BFG10K]

Esactly - 4/8 is the highest setting all cards support.

 

[Marsumane]

I think they do multiple settings just for the same reason that they do more then just the top card. Were not all cookie cutter gamers. We all dont play at the same settings. Also its good for analyzing how archetecture handles a perticular setting. This would give us a hunch as to how it would perform at an even high setting (in many cases) Maybe we dont all have high end LCDs or Mid range CRTs to play games on. Or maybe we all dont have a top of the line processor. Maybe some of us dont want to play IL-2 at 40fps and want 60 or even 80 in another game. There are countless reasons to display other benchmarks. The tides often turn at higher settings.

 

[duragezic]

Well, well, all this time I figured that all you guys were using AA with these newer video cards. Thx for the link... I had an original Radeon for crying out loud (which has FSAA but is waaay too slow for any use) for so long before I just upgraded to a 3200+ & 9800P. I am playing most games like Far Cry, Joint Ops, and UT 2004 @ 1024x768, 4x AA, 8x AF. But now that everyone seems to use High res + af over lower res + AA + AF I will give that a try out after work today!!

Oh and wasn't Truform suppose to be ATIs big thing that wouldnt drop fps much but do so so much? I've never seen it used yet. I have it set to App. Perference but I don't have any games that use it...

 

[gururu]

Originally posted by: duragezic

Oh and wasn't Truform suppose to be ATIs big thing that wouldnt drop fps much but do so so much? I've never seen it used yet. I have it set to App. Perference but I don't have any games that use it...

truform adds so much to ut2k3 and 4. I'm dying to see how the new cards handle the perfomance hit. But NOBODY'S trying it. I think it is still a major plus for ATI cards.

 

[rbV5]

Oh and wasn't Truform suppose to be ATIs big thing that wouldnt drop fps much but do so so much?

Trueform or n-patches are dependant on developer support and was dropped from being supported in hardware after the 8500 cards. There is a pretty fair performance hit when enabled with the newer cards.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

truform can be turned on in return to castle wolfenstein, if us set application preference then go in the game and also switch it on, RTCW looks great, the same ppl have made CoD so maybe u can activate it in there too?