Anti-Aliasing on or off?

[Coderedpl]

What does anti-aliasing do anyway?

Should i have it on or off?

[1Sgt.Kenny-R2K]

been wondering the same thing...

[Roderick]

This question comes up in almost every game I play of late that involves a mass amount of multiplayer interaction.

Some say no and others say yes, but never truely explain what the pro and con is for doing it. I know you will gain more FPS with it off, but what is the con for having it off?

[warchild.IrishRage]

If your system can handle it ON , as high as you can, basically it smooths the pixels so they dont have hard edges and improves the graphics overall.. simplest way i can explain it

[Cotizi]

AA runs processes to remove the jaggie lines that you see at intersections of objects. in my opinion it makes a big difference if your graphics card is able to do so effectively. this however puts more strain on your card and will reduce game fps. i play at 2xAA and find that it works well for me since 4xAA starts to slow down my fps.

[Berrern]

Anti-aliasing smooths the edges, so they wont look so choppy/pixelated.

This gives a great boost in graphic quality, but puts a huge hog on your system resources.

Just try it; if it works without lag then go for it :)

[glaeken]

It smooths the image out by making lines that are not horizontal or vertical smoother and less jaggy.

I have it turned on and it makes quite a difference in BF2 I find. This is one setting you should really be able to tell the difference on so turn it on and then play and check out the difference.

It is a performance hit though so if you get a lot of FPS loss I would turn it off.

[rombaft]

depending .

First tell us your system en screen resolution , for example, in my case.

I have an flat 19inch screen, resoltuion is max 1240 * 1024 or something like that.

When I play on resolution 1024*748 with AA 4x the image is nice, but when I play on 1240*1024 with AA 2x the picture looks much better.

First try wich resolution your system can handle, because this will give you better image quality and is a bit less demanding then AA, once you find a nice resolution, then you can try AA, but remember AA is a very demanding calculation for you vid card

[tjr1973]

You know the jagged lines on the edges of everything you look at? The higher you turn AA up, the smoother those lines get. Leave it off and start the game. Look the the edges of everything and anything. Notice how it's all jaggy looking. Exit, crank AA to the max in the game settings and crank it in your video card control panel as well. Restart the game and now look at all the edges. They should be smooth in comparison to what they were.

When I play the game I have AA turned up to the max since I think it makes the game look extremely better. Just experiment and see what works best for you.

[Ghiest]

I'd run 16FSAA if the game would support it :P ...

It improves almost everything you look at really in the game, as other people have said it smooths the lines where polygons meet, so the character model you look at that is made up for 13,000 polygons ... the Anti-aliasing smooths each and everyone after it has been displayed to make it look alot smoother giving the texutres much more depth and the bumpmap a more rounded look.

[blokie]

how do you find out what your Frames per second is ?

[HicRic]

console command "renderer.drawFps 1", I think. But you can just go by eye: Play the game with max AA. Does it seem jerky and horrible, or smooth and playable? Find a level at which you can maintain smooth gameplay even with action and explosions going on.

[Solar71]

Aa

it depends on your hardware...
AAx2 will make edges smoother looking...
AAx4 is really nice... makes everything look ultra smooth... and somewhat more realistic...
Some cards have AAx8 but it ussually makes the frame rate drop a bit...

My card = 6800 GT (PCIE) overclocked to 440/1200
Can run at 1280x960 with AAx4 and everything set to high...
And i get about 60-90 fps... on 32-40 player...


Some cards can not handle this...

If you turn off AA the image looks pixelated...
But here is the thing...
In FPS action shooters, the action is so fast, that you really cant enjoy the image quality with AA... its just a waste...

I play HL2 and you have time to look around and just be blown away by the image quality... Some with Rome total war... just awesome....

But this game is all about SPEED!!! and shoot shoot kill...
So AA might not be very important...

Good luck

[badasafish]

pisses me off when people come here asking questions cos they are too lazy or stupid to use google.

[C11.Nemisis]

i have it off, puts too much strain on my vid card in multiplayer