Anti-Aliasing and GTX560 and....

[Shivago]

I am trying to learn as much as I can about my graphics hardware. One of the things I find confusing is anti-aliasing. What is it? What does it do for me as a gamer/video editor? x2, x3, x4, and so on. How does one differentiate? What do I need to consider when choosing my "AA Setting"

rightnow I am using a 560GTX and will be evolving upto a 780GTX

 

[DComander1x]

I am trying to learn as much as I can about my graphics hardware. One of the things I find confusing is anti-aliasing. What is it? What does it do for me as a gamer/video editor? x2, x3, x4, and so on. How does one differentiate? What do I need to consider when choosing my "AA Setting"

rightnow I am using a 560GTX and will be evolving upto a 780GTX

Anti-Aliasing smooths jagged or stair like lines in games, so it doesn't look like a game from the 90s, and makes it look more realistic. The individual levels allows you to select how strong the anti-aliasing is, meaning the lower numbers, x2 to x4 is weak, x5 to x8 is stronger and anything above those is super strong. The higher the level is, the heavier the load placed on the graphics card's GPU is. What you need to consider when rasing the level is the load the game already places by default on your graphics card, as it goes from 5% extra load to about 20%, so if a game already places about 50% load with bursts to 15% depending on the action on screen, then a higher level will top out the graphics card, and slow everything down.

 

[aznricepuff]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_anti-aliasing

Antialiasing (AA) is a technique to reduce aliasing, which is an effect that results in visual artifacts (usually jagged lines) when trying to render high-resolution objects at lower resolutions. If you've ever looked at a diagonal line in a video game with AA turned off, you'll probably see that instead of a straight line it looks like a staircase - that effect is aliasing.

Antialiasing tries to reduces those artifacts by sampling objects at a higher resolution than the display resolution then downscaling the image to the display resolution while applying a subtle "blurring" effect to soften the edges of borders and make jagged lines less visible. The "x2, x4, x8, etc" you see in AA options is how much supersampling is used. AA x2 will supersample objects at twice the display resolution, x4 at four times, etc.

There are many different types of AA techniques that you will see in games. The most basic are SSAA (super-sample AA) and MSAA (multi-sample AA), both of which effectively require the GPU to render every frame at a multiple of the display resolution. Because of this they are both very performance intensive. MSAA is better performance-wise because it contains optimizations that allow it to only supersample certain components of the image. At 1080p, 4x MSAA is usually used as a "gold standard" by which to judge other AA implementations, both in terms of visual quality and performance cost.

There are newer AA algorithms that don't involve supersampling, like FXAA (fast approximate AA). FXAA in particular is merely a post-processing algorithm designed specifically to smooth jagged lines by using edge detection. Thus it has very little performance cost compared to MSAA. However it results in a global blurring effect (something you don't see with MSAA) and it may not reduce aliasing as effectively as higher-multiple implementations of MSAA (greater than x4). MLAA (morphological AA) is another post-process AA method that is has a low performance cost but also introduces blurring. Because these methods do not use supersampling, you will not see them listed with multiples (i.e. you will never see as an option "2x FXAA" or "4x FXAA"; it is always just "FXAA").

SMAA (enhanced sub-pixel morphological AA) is a hybrid of post-processing and supersampling AA methods that comes at an intermediate performance cost but without the blurring effect of pure post-process methods like FXAA and MLAA). And finally, TXAA is a new technique developed by Nvidia that adds a temporal element to the AA effect, reducing the "shimmering" effect you sometimes see with aliased images as you move the camera around. It is fairly performance intensive (Nvidia claims that 4xTXAA is faster than 4xMSAA but that has not been my experience) but does result in some nice-looking images.

When choosing an AA option, choose the one that gives you the best quality at a performance cost that is acceptable to you. With a GTX 780 you will probably be able to afford 4x MSAA at 1080p in most games. My suggestion is to start off at 4x MSAA (most games offer MSAA). If that lowers your framerate too much then go down to either 2x MSAA or something like FXAA.

 

[Shivago]

fantastic answers guys how do I pick both as my most helpful. I know that there is only a few replys but you all deserve the credit, thanks so much, its exactly what I was looking for as far as an explanation.

I am wondering is there some kind of reference website where i can see the optimal settings for each game, games in particuaar atm BF3/4,Star Citizen ect ect. see what setting I can put so I run each game optimally?

 

[DComander1x]

fantastic answers guys how do I pick both as my most helpful. I know that there is only a few replys but you all deserve the credit, thanks so much, its exactly what I was looking for as far as an explanation.

I am wondering is there some kind of reference website where i can see the optimal settings for each game, games in particuaar atm BF3/4,Star Citizen ect ect. see what setting I can put so I run each game optimally?

No problem.
http://www.geforce.com/ - they have the settings for most games.

 

[aznricepuff]

www.tweakguides.com

That site has recommendations, screenshot comparisons, and benchmarking for pretty much every in-game graphics setting for a bunch of games, including BF3. It also gives recommendations on configuration file/in-game console tweaking (i.e. options you can't find in the graphics menu). It's a very good resource for getting the most out of games visually while keeping performance hit to a minimum.