can someone please explain

[paradisiac]

ok, i know this is probably going to sound really stupid, and will be told to do some google searches. i have but the answers seem to be a bit in depth.
1. what is AA (i think its how well it defines the blacks??)
2. what is AF
3. whats the difference in bilinear, trilinear.....
4. whats vsync
5. what are any of the other settings that would be usefull to change

cheers.

 

[Hairybudda]

ok, i know this is probably going to sound really stupid, and will be told to do some google searches. i have but the answers seem to be a bit in depth.
1. what is AA (i think its how well it defines the blacks??)
2. what is AF
3. whats the difference in bilinear, trilinear.....
4. whats vsync
5. what are any of the other settings that would be usefull to change

cheers.

Simply:

AA is Anti-Aliasing, it smoothes the edges of the polygons that your 3d scenes are made up of, reducing 'jaggy' lines resulting in a net increase in image quality.
AF is Anisotropic Filtering, Billinear and Trilinear filtering are basically all one and the same, it is a lot to explain so i point you here. Make sure you read the link on mip mapping too for a full understanding.
vsync is vertical synchronisation. You probably have a monitor that is at least 60hz, that means the screen updates 60 times a second regardless of what you're viewing. Setting vsync in games means your graphics card is limited to drawing new frames only when your monitor tells it it is about to refresh the screen. This effectively caps your framerate at 60.

I'm not the best at explaining these things so let me know if you dont understand.

 

[paradisiac]

Simply:

AA is Anti-Aliasing, it smoothes the edges of the polygons that your 3d scenes are made up of, reducing 'jaggy' lines resulting in a net increase in image quality.
AF is Anisotropic Filtering, Billinear and Trilinear filtering are basically all one and the same, it is a lot to explain so i point you here. Make sure you read the link on mip mapping too for a full understanding.
vsync is vertical synchronisation. You probably have a monitor that is at least 60hz, that means the screen updates 60 times a second regardless of what you're viewing. Setting vsync in games means your graphics card is limited to drawing new frames only when your monitor tells it it is about to refresh the screen. This effectively caps your framerate at 60.

I'm not the best at explaining these things so let me know if you dont understand.

yeah i think i get that. so AA is best to set as high as i can without it slowing the game down too much, AF (havent read the article yet) but the gist i have got from skimming it, it helps the objects in the distance have more detail, but is very hardware instensive, so is probably the main setting that will sloooow down the fps. and vysnc is a no no really unless you have a 120Hz monitor as it would cap the fps too low on a 60Hz TV/Monitor? does that sound about right?

 

[Hairybudda]

yeah i think i get that. so AA is best to set as high as i can without it slowing the game down too much, AF (havent read the article yet) and vysnc is a no no really unless you have a 120Hz monitor as it would cap the fps too low on a 60Hz TV/Monitor? does that sound about right?

AA is a personal thing, if things look to rough around the edges and you're rocking a high frame rate, bump it up a notch and see if it plays any better.

AF is (in very very general terms) about horizontal texture quality. If textures get 'blurry' as they go into the distance then bump up AA and see if the performance drop is worth the gain in quality. I personally don't see a whole lot of difference above 8 hit AF but then I tend to not play large terrain based games or racers so I doubt I would see much of a difference.

vsync, yeah, keep it off unless you're getting massive shearing, and if you are just bump up other quality settings to slow your framerate down. If you absolutely must enable vsync, make sure to to enable triple buffering so that the card pre renders a few frames so input doesn't seem to lag!

 

[Cookeh]

iirc, vsync is pretty much useless as very few monitors have a high enough refresh rate to warrant its use

 

[MoNkEyMiKeY]

Vsync is best to have on. I always get a lot of screen tearing without it. And its very off putting. The human eye can't really notice above 30fps. Capping at 60fps is perfectly smooth. If however you're benchmarking then turn it off to acheive yur highest possible FPS.