Gaming and Anti-Alias

[diabloplayer75]

Alright, so i don't know too much about anti-alias, but i was told the amount you should use is dependent on your screen size and resolution?

Well, i have a 19" 1280-1024 931bf monitor, and was curious what type of anti-alias i should be going at when playing games, 8x-16x or the 8xQ and 16xQ?

Or does it not actually make a difference and you should always just aim for the most?

thanks :)

[polobunny]

First, you should understand what anti-alias do.

Now a standard with 3D acceleration, anti-aliasing smoothes the edges of diagonal lines across your screen that result from not high-enough of a resolution. For example, when you are looking down a hallway in Quake III, the floor and walls might look realistic, but the diagonal edge at the ceiling will appear jagged. Although filtering aids in elimination of some jagged edges, anti-aliasing is the most effective method of fixing such mistakes in a 3D environment. The most common types of anti-aliasing are super-sampling and multi-sampling.

Tweak3D.net - 3D Dictionary

It's always a personal preference, performance VS visual quality. Sometimes you will not be able to run anti-alias at a certain level and still be able to keep the game fluid.
Anti-aliasing effects are more noticeable with smaller resolutions. Using a 1920x1200 resolution, there's very very little difference (on the visual quality aspect) between 4x and 8x. Using a 1280x1024 resolution, there's very little difference between 8x and 16x. 8x would be my suggestion.

[gvblake22]

The idea that the level of AA is dependant on your screen size is not a good way to think about it because the two have nothing to do with each other to work. What some people claim is that the apparent need for AA on a monitor with a small pixel pitch (space between the pixels) is less compared to that on a monitor with a larger pixel pitch. This is because the aliasing effects (jagged, stair-step edges) is a little easier to see on monitors with a large pixel pitch (because the image is physically bigger). To add to the confusion, pixel pitch does not stay the same depending on the screen size. 15" and 19" LCD monitors actually have the largest pixel pitches of typical monitors, while 17" and 24" monitors tend to have the smallest. A 32" 720P HDTV has an even larger pixel pitch because the screen is so big and there are so few pixels. It all depends on how many pixels you are cramming into a certain space. That said, the noticeable difference of pixel pitch on typical computer LCDs is not very big, so the effects of aliasing across the different screens is going to be even less noticeable.

As for what type of AA you should be running, that all depends on the video card you have and how much you care about the look of your game. If you have a relatively beefy video card (like an 8800GT) and a smaller monitor (like a 19" LCD), then you can probably get away with cranking the AA up as high as it will go. Just remember that AA takes a lot of GPU processing power and can really kill your framerates at higher levels. In general, you generally just keep cranking up the AA level until your game drops below an acceptable framerate, in which case you would lower the AA to the previously acceptable setting.

Beyond that, there are different quality settings for each level of AA that totally depend on which GPU and driver version you have. Here I'm talking about the "adaptive AA" or "transparency AA", "high quality AA", "super high quality AA", etc. Some of these settings will make little (if any) noticeable difference in image quality while others can be very noticeable. You can do some google searching on specific types of AA quality to find some explanations of each different one specific to your GPU. the nvidia GeForce 8 series for example features the "Lumenex Engine" and sports the following features:

• 16x full screen anti-aliasing
• Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling
• 16x angle independent anisotropic filtering
• 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing
• Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data
• Support for normal map compression
• Z-cull
• Early-Z