Do you use anti-aliasing much

MooseJam

Thought I'd load up COD4 today and have some fun, I'm at the sniper level ,so it loads up and wow whats going on here - major freeze frame action 2 or 3 frames per second, what the hell is going on here says I , all was running fine up to now so I checks my settings and there's the culprit God Damn anti-aliasing set to 4*, I didn't think I had it on as I don't usually - I think it's a pile of sh1te tbh , wow the edges are smoother and at what cost well you can't play the game anymore- it should be renamed "screw up my frame rates"

yoyo

AA always kills framerates, and is only really neccisary at low resolutions (Resolutions above 1280x1024 prob wont need AA as they will render smooth anyway), I'd always turn it off as even on the most powerful hardware can make some new games come to a crawl, I think it had more of a use in the past, when gaming at 800x600 or 1024x768 was low Jaggies would have been noticeable, these days with all the crazy high resolutions though that can be done its overkill, of course this is just my opinion and some people may differ

Nick

Sierra Oscar

If my computer can handle it, which is usually yes...then hell ya!

tman

If a game gives you the option to turn it on in the graphics settings screen, then I'd normally stick it on either 2x or 4x.
Normally can't be arsed changing the settings through the nvidia control panel, so I just leave it off there and do without it for most games.

I've got an 8800gts, and my monitor's native resolution is 1280x1024, so cranking it up full doesn't usually have that much of a noticeable impact on performance. (apart from when running the horribly optimised Crysis...)
I'll be getting a better monitor soon though, so I'd say I'll be keeping it turned off due to the higher res

conzy

AA works great on Source Engine games...

Use it if you can but sometimes it isnt worth the drop in performance... And who is going to notice some jagged edges in the heat of a COD4 battle?

Canis Lupus

If I can play a game without it impacting performance then I whack AA and AF on. If the game performs poorly then it's usually the first thing to be taken off unles it's the sort of game that realy needs it like airplane games. Jagged wings.... eurgh!

LookingFor

conzymaher wrote: »

AA works great on Source Engine games..

True, they have a very clean look. Some of them look like touched up screenshots with higher levels of AA, tis very nice.

L31mr0d

if I can i'll turn it up all the way, if I can't i'll leave it maybe 2x or 4x. Even at 2x I notice a big difference in games.

A good example is Call of Juarez with the DX10 patch. With AA off the leaves in the trees look like just blocky green pixels, but at 16QX AA it actually looks like real foliage in the trees refracting the light.

Maximilian

AA is something I can usually live without. I run games at 1680x1050 so like yoyo said, you hardly notice jagged pixels.

po0k

It makes screenshots look good.
Useless for playing the game.
It adds overhead and lag to each frame drawn.

Dregon

I don't turn it on, my 6800 can't handle it.:(:(

Morlar

I tend to use it though I agree its the biggest performance hit for the least advantage.

You can notice it between on full whack and when its off - between the different levels of 'on' though it gets tricky to tell them apart. I think if you can do if you cant your not gonna miss much.

Genghiz Cohen

I like to have a little AA, even 2x makes the entire experience more pleasant.

Balfa

I use it as much as possible. Newer video cards are designed to be more efficient at anti-aliasing the screen, so the framerate doesn't drop nearly as much as it would with older video cards. They're designed to do a lot of parallel processing, which is heavily involved in AA.

So if you have an nvidia 7xxx or 8xxx, it's probably worth turning it on, otherwise you're just wasting some of your card's built-in ability.

It's also very useful if you have an LCD screen (I don't), because you can leave the resolution at the LCD's (comparatively low) native resolution, and then just fiddle with AA until you get the quality/performance trade-off you want.

Naikon

I don't bother using it because as said before, AA kills the framerate in most new games. I much prefare more fps over smoother edges tbh.

I play at 1280x1024 so jaggies it are not even noticable for the most part.
AF yields much better image quality, and I usually have it set to a multiple of 2 to clean up the look on distant textures.

cuppa

whats 16xQ CSAA ,thats what i have css on ,,have no clue what it is

yoyo

cuppa wrote: »

whats 16xQ CSAA ,thats what i have css on ,,have no clue what it is

This mite help ya http://developer.nvidia.com/object/coverage-sampled-aa.html, Also 16x is quite a high rate of AA to have in a game, means next to none jaggies

Nick