Who actually uses AA and AF?

While AF is a must (at least 8x), I don't think AA is a essential. Its great for admiring the graphics but once I get down to playing the game I hardly notice it. I'm playing through SC Chaos Theory right now and the anti-aliasing box is blanked out so I went ahead and just started to play the game and was suprised to see how good it looked even without any AA.

Framerate bothers me most and I usually aim for 60fps, even if I have to turn off AA.
 
I have AA and AF set at maximum all the time in every game i play. It just looks better. Unfortunately ive just bought an Xbox 360 and the jaggies in PGR3 are very noticable and distracting. :o
 
i hate the way games look with no AA
i think the biggest difference you will notice is going from 0 AA to 2x AA ( in quality) 2x is ebnough to take the edge off.

not too fussed about AF, but i always max my games out anyway... kinda cos i can
 
depends on games themselves.. like doom3, i don't require any AA and just play it at 1600x1200.
but farcry, that requires AA since it sufferes a lot more from aliasing.

its all game dependant. but where ever possible i prefer to up the resolution rather than slap on AA.
 
R B CUSTOMS said:
not too fussed about AF
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I always use both, but if I had to choose, I would use AF before I use AA.

Having no AF just makes textures, especially the floor, look utterly rubbish and washed out beyond belief. Takes away a hell of a lot of immersion for me when the floor suddenly fades to solid colour at 2ft. away.
 
I like how AF sharpens up the floor as mentioned already, but AA gets on my nerves with its huge overheads for little return.

Much rather a 72fps synced experience @ 1280x960 - won't even notice edges in an action game running at this pace.
 
You mean there are people who don't use AA and AF?
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Put yourselves in the position of a person with a 6600 GT and a 17/19" TFT with a native resolution of 1280x1024. Turning on AA and AF is deciding between nice eye candy and steady framerate. The fact is most casual gamers don't have 7900 GTXs and X1900XTXs they have 9800 Pros and 6600 GTs and the odd 6800 GS and 7600 GT floating around there.
This may come as a shock to you.

but AA gets on my nerves with its huge overheads for little return.
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That is exactly how I feel.
 
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Dev2 said:
Put yourselves in the position of a person with a 6600 GT and a 17/19" TFT with a native resolution of 1280x1024. Turning on AA and AF is deciding between nice eye candy and steady framerate. The fact is most casual gamers don't have 7900 GTXs and X1900XTXs they have 9800 Pros and 6600 GTs and the odd 6800 GS and 7600 GT floating around there.
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Erm, how about you put yourself in my position as someone who just came from a 6600GT and X800 GTO²? :confused: I am not some spoiled kid who gets everything he wants from mummy and daddy's credit card, poking fun at the little people, you know.

Battlefield 2 and other titles from last year played just fine for me on both cards with AA and AF on, the only game that made me want to upgrade whatsoever was Oblivion.

Dev2 said:
This may come as a shock to you.
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It doesn't shock me at all? :confused: I am not sure why you're getting so defensive TBH, not two months ago I was one of those people. :rolleyes:
 
Jabbs said:
yeah called xbox360 owners
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LOL. Doesn't the X360 have 2xAA or something similar though? Can't remember where I read that.

I have seen Oblivion on an X360 though, and the crawling textures and lack of AF made me want to throw up. :o
 
Úlfhednar, Sorry I didn't mean to come across that way. I'm not defensive at all. Sometimes on plain text it's hard to get sense of what the other person means by their comments as there is no tone of voice or facial expressions. Hence I should use these :D more often. I wasn't implying you were some spoiled rich kid. But how you managed to get Battlefield 2 to run at a stable framerate with AA and AF is beyond me. I can't accept anything below 55. I'm just too picky I guess. :cool:
 
I used to be very much against AA due to the performance hit - I also didn't really think it made that much difference to the IQ. Over the past year or so, however, my opinion has totally flipped. Now I have to have AA - I just can't stand the jaggies! Same with AF. Actually, it was HL2 that started it all for me - that was the first game I ever played where the jaggies and blurry textures really got on my nerves.

AA is also important to me because I'm limited to 1024x768 at 85Hz, so playing at a high resolution is not an option.....unless I want to use a headache-inducing 60 or 70Hz.
 
Úlfhednar said:
Out of curiosity, what resolution do you play games in?
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1440x900. i don't play a great deal of games but here's a few i've played recently.....

hl2 and hl2:episode one
gta:sa
quake4
cod2 (dx7 mode)

i have a pretty low end card by todays standards (see sig :p) but i can still play these games at my monitor's native res with most details on high-ish settings. enabling aa kills these games.

but even before when i used to game on my 17in crt with a 6800gt i could hardly tell the difference anyway. :D
 
Dev2 said:
Úlfhednar, Sorry I didn't mean to come across that way. I'm not defensive at all. Sometimes on plain text it's hard to get sense of what the other person means by their comments as there is no tone of voice or facial expressions. Hence I should use these :D more often.
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That's ok, sorry for accusing you of that. :) I totally agree though, stupid intarweb text! :o

Dev2 said:
I wasn't implying you were some spoiled rich kid. But how you managed to get Battlefield 2 to run at a stable framerate with AA and AF is beyond me. I can't accept anything below 55. I'm just too picky I guess.
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I had a ~50fps average in Battlefield 2 on my 6600GT running at 1024x768 with 2xAA and 8xAF enabled, and about ~70fps in 1280x960 with 4xAA and 16xAF on my X800 GTO² when it was soft-modded to X850 XT PE speeds.

Naturally the minimum FPS would dip down to the 30s quite a lot on the 6600GT, but it was fine for me since a lot of people suck so much at Battlefield 2 that you don't need to be totally smooth to kill them. ;) Runs a lot better on my X1800XT though, 1440x900 with 6xAA and 16xHQAF hehe.

marc2003 said:
1440x900. i don't play a great deal of games but here's a few i've played recently.....

hl2 and hl2:episode one
gta:sa
quake4
cod2 (dx7 mode)
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See 1440x900 is fine with no antialiasing, especially with those games since they have such sharp graphics anyway. If you had said 1024x768 or something then you would have earned a flick around the ear-hole. ;)
 
Personally I tend to use 4x AF with no AA in most modern games. If framerate is good, the first thing I'll do is up the resolution to 1600x1200 before applying AA, and then AF up 16x. If the game is still smooth then I'll bring AA into play.

So basicaly for me AA is just a way of soaking up any extra GPU I may have, typically for older games. The only exception would be NFS:MW in which I found setting 2xAA less damaging to performance than going from 1280x960 to 1600x1200.
 
The only game I really play is Live For Speed, which isn't *that* graphically demanding, but does like a decent cpu.

I play at 1600x1200 with full AA and AF and nearly always have an fps of 70+, without them you can really see the difference.

My specs aren't what I would class as anywhere near uber...AMD64 3500, X800 Bravo and 1gb ram.
 
Depends on the game. Some games fair better with AA/AF tweaked down than others.

In general I have AA X2 and AF X8. My res is usually 1280x960/1024
 
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