Anti-Aliasing Good thing or bad thing?

iknowreal

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Dec 3, 2013
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This is my current rigg

would also would like to know what you guys think about fair expectations for this gaming PC.

Case: Antec Nine Hundread
Power Supply: Antec NeoECO 620w
Motherboard: ASUS M5A97 R2.0 AM3+
CPU: AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0GHz (4.2GHz Turbo)
Operating System : Windows 8.1 Pro
Graphics Card: XFX Core Edition Radeon HD 7850 1GB
Ram: G.SKILL 8GB (2 x 4GB)
SSD: 120gb Kingston
Hard Drive: Western Digital 2TB & 1TB
Cooling System: Evo hypercoolermax blah.
Extra Fan: Antec 120mm
DVD Burner : ASUS 24X DVD Burner
USB Wifi: TP-LINK Wireless N150

I have heard many people say my graphics card is bad. So what I would like to know is Anti-Aliasing Good thing or bad thing for me? When should I use it when do I need to use it. As far as gaming is concerned.
 
Well it really matters on what you prefer. Fast game with low/medium graphics would definitely mean NO Anti-aliasing unless you're playing very undemanding games. Anti-Aliasing is where the GPU filters/renders shadows, curved edges etc so they look smooth and realistic. So, if you want a playable experience keep it off or at a minimum. Although, it does really mater what you're playing.
 
Nothing wrong that I can see. 7850 is a respectable card. That 1GB might start hurting in a year or so. (7850 = R9-270, which roughly equals a GTX760) It is recommended to have about 2GB of VRAM these days. And there are already games that push well past that.

Anti-aliasing, and there are many algorithms used, has the GPU calculate the appropriate color to blend the edges of objects together. This removes the jagged edges on textures and sprites. It is a resource intensive operation. It can make a game appear to look nicer, but you will suffer frame rate penalties.

If you are in the market for a new card, 3-4GB VRAM would be what I would look out for.
 


for me personally, i cant afford to have the luxury of a top quality monitor, im in a tiny room and i have a large flat screen tv on the wall at the end of my bed, with a wireless keyboard and mouse... my flat tv is only capable of a resolution of 1024x768 but since its on such a large screen the quality is excellent for watching movies and playing games.. when i switch of AA i can certainly notice the jagged edges in games and it becomes distracting and annoying, so because i am running such a low resolution i can ramp up everything with mysetup to ultra.. its such a joy to play games on a big screen and the AA is a must have for low res players like myself
 
I don't know I like all of these answers everyone gave very practical sound advice. From what I am understanding if I'm playing a game where everything is on ULTRA MAX Everything then Ant-aliasing might as well go on but I will lose frame rates. If I'm playing a game n say medium or low and my fps is already like 250 and it only needs 60fps then it's a waste of time.
 


if your playing a game at maximum resolution then AA may aswell be switched off as the detail in the resolution itself will be sharp and edges wont be noticeable.. the lower the resolution the more AA is needed. The higher the resolution the less AA is needed..
 
They way to look at it is this. Most games have preset detail levels. Most high and ultra settings include Anti-aliasing, Antistrophic Filtering and other things like detailed shadows. You can leave all the other settings high and turn these off. You will see great improvement in performance.

If you are running a game at 250FPS absolutely turn all the settings up. Your screen can't possibly display that many frames so that is just wasted effort. Instead put it into the details settings and the game will look better.

Just depends on personal taste. I used to dislike AA in older titles because it didn't do much but make things look fuzzy. In newer games, where they approach a moderate approximation of photorealism, it helps out a lot.