Which of the anti aliasing options are best?

[Chisty Cyrus]

I am often confused which anti aliasing option will I choose ,despite of the fact that my rig can handle any of them..(At least till now.)
Many say MSAA is the best as it smoothens the visual whereas many others say that it's SMAA that has better optimization and renders better FPS ,bleh bleh..
HW experts, I would request you guys to clearly give me an explanation so that I can precisely decide which one will I choose..
Or even if it varies from game to game care to explain please..

 

[oxiide]

Usually the most effective antialiasing is supersampling, or SSAA, which renders the game at a higher resolution and then downscales it. Its a brute-force method and looks great, but the performance hit is usually terrible. Depending on the game, your resolution, and your hardware it may be doable.

SMAA and FXAA are generally the "worst" as far as visual quality, but are have a pretty low performance cost. FXAA in particular can sometimes blur textures quite badly in some games.

 

[maddogfargo]

There is no clear answer for this question as various game titles support various AA methods, and very few support all of them.

What title are you playing?

SSAA and MSAA generally have better appearance.

SMAA and SSAO generally have better performance and decent appearance.

FXAA is essentially a VFX blur filter that indescriminately softens the entire rendered image, not just edges.

NO AA with Super Sample rendering is similar to SSAA and available in some titles, but not all.

Some 3rd party add-ons will even allow you to force certain AA modes not normally supported after the game is loaded.

Sometimes forcing a specific AA and Anisotropic filter level in the GPU control panel can cause games that don't support this to crash, fail to launch or render only a black screen.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Hi Chisty

You might want to give these two articles a read:

• 
  ■Anti-Aliasing Analysis, Part 1: Settings And Surprises
  http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/anti-aliasing-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon,review-32166.html
  ■Anti-Aliasing Analysis, Part 2: Performance
  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-performance,3065.html

Thanks
Andrew

 

[joselo025]

X64