Catalyst AA Modes?

[Fishwithadeagle]

I have just been looking through the settings and realized that I should start to mess with the AA modes because my monitor is terrible (1440x900). Anyways, my question is that when I turn on SSAA, I get random frame rate drops even though the gpu is not running at max. I have a 7870 hawk. Also, what do you recommend for the AA settings on most fps under the catalyst control panel.

 

[bgunner]

AA is very GPU intensive, any mode that you enable AA in will cause a frame rate drop no matter what. It is just the extent of the drop that matters in this case. I prefer to stay at 60 FPS otherwise I can see the drop in frames. Some people consider 30 to be a minimum playable frame rate, which I agree on, so you need to make a decision on the lowest you want your frames rates to go then adjust from there.

Every game will respond differently to AA and different modes of AA All I can say is play around with it and see what happens on your machine. My settings would be no good for you and your settings will be no good for me so you just need to experiment with the settings like everyone else does.

Good luck

 

[Fishwithadeagle]

My other question is why the fps drops when the gpu is not being fully utilized and I have ruled out memory bandwidth. On top of that, I am trying to figure out why SSAA makes textures look better. Aren't they supposed to both be full and then scaled down to the screen you are playing on, making textures look the same?

All I care about is having the highest texture quality possible, jaggies don't bother me THAT much.

 

[bgunner]

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/113394-13-anti-aliasing

this will help explain some. I cant find the article that Toms did on it ATM, if i find it i will post a link.

AA only uses just so much of the processing power, if it used to much you would get very low FPS. I mean 1-2 FPS. The programmers only let it do just so much. If the game at one point needed 50% of the GPU and the other 50% of the GPU was AA what would happen if the game needed more GPU power? Low lagy frame rates. this explains the low GPU usage.

 

[Fishwithadeagle]

That makes more sense, I had that issue when I emulated physx on the 7870. Anyways, what about the textures. Also, thanks for the responses.

 

[bgunner]

AA doesn't have much to do with texture if any at all. That is more Anistropic filtering. I don't have a good answer to that question.

this is just a guess at why textures seem better, because the jaggies are missing you can focus more on the detail of the textures.

 

[bgunner]

found what I was looking for, there is a part 1 & 2. Good reading I think for those that need some clarity.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon,2868.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-performance,3065.html