Anti-aliasing - does anyone really care?

In honesty, I never enable AA - even with my new 8800 GTX.

The new ATI 2900 XT card will offer 24x AA - who cares?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/r600-architecture_8.html

Seriously, I've never seen why some people get so worked up regarding AA and the apparant 'jaggies'.

I'm intrigued as to what the hell is going on here - I play computer games every single day - I cannot (in complete honesty) say that I have ever noticed 'jaggies' or ever felt the need to enable AA because a game looked poor.

I used to play games in 1,024 x 768, but now mainly play in 1,280 x 1,024. These are hardly high-end resolutions, yet some people who play in higher resolutions panic over 'jaggies' that I cannot seem to notice at a lower resolution.

I want this AA fetish to cease.

However, are there any valid points here in defence of these people. I can imagine people doing this for graphical work etc - but playing a game?

So come on - if you think AA is the bee-knees then let's hear it. I want an AA lover to justify this nonce-sense.

I always run AA on everything. It looks so ugly without it.

I never turn on AA either.

im not sure, somehow its now on and i cant turn it off.. but i think with AA on its all nicer.

I never turn on AA, too. Because my PC is to slow for this :D

cheers,
DAK

puki you need to get a new pair of glasses. :)

Games look much nicer with anti-aliasing, you don't get jagged edges on everything and you don't get crawling along almost horizontal or vertical lines.

I never turn it on, cept on those few games where if you dont turn aa on the radion card wont show text right

I turn on AA when I'm taking screenshots cuz they show up like crazy then.

I think it depends on the genre. In a fast-paced first person shooter, I'm wondering how people see the jaggies without getting their ass fragged while they're pixel-gazing. In an RPG where you spend a lot of time exploring, yeah, I notice the jaggies and if it doesn't hit performance much ( it usually doesn't ) I have it turned on.

I love AA. It's a shame you can't have both AA and HDR lighting enabled at once in Oblivion.

I have issues with AA in 3D games. I can't run things in the highest rez, and AA even at 640 or 800 (whichever is the smallest I can put it in) would be nice but still slows everything down for me.

I like to put the settings of my games all the way down... I don't care much about looks in them so it is no big deal.

However, there are a few Ps2 games that offer AA versus no-AA (don't remember which) and I always turn it on because it will always look 'better'

however. AA in 2D games is an absolute MUST. Be it through alpha PNGs or even faked up to a mostly neutral edge (tho I don't know why people would do that when we have PNGs with Alpha now...

But yeah.. In 3D games it will oneday be a requirement, that or the rez will be so high that it won't matter. Either way.

Theoretically you can get better performance and looks out of AA in 3D games, cause you will lose all the jaggies that are the best give-away that something isn't real. A high enough rez will do the same. The would have to be greater than HD, as I can still see the jaggies at HD quality. At the same time, a 640 by 480 photo looks like a photo. It all comes down to the AA in that regard.

The lower the rez, the better things will look with AA turned on...

I used to not care about Anti Aliasing but after seeing the improvement it made to some of my 2d games I always use it (coded in blitzplus though - not hardware driven).

However given I haven't played a 3d game regularly in the last year or so I don't bother with the graphics card settings beyond attaching the laptop to tv sometimes.

When I render things in XSI, obviously AA is important - but once again calculated not by the vid card's settings but as part of the mental-ray render process.

It always looks bad in screenshots when no AA is used - motion tends to hide the issue of jaggies.

I always turn it on. Due to the fact that I can.

Cant say I've ever notice any difference between the two.

Actually, thats not quite accurate - with AA on, performance significantly decreased for no apparent result...

Its why I never turn it on.

The AA on my 9800XT was fairly new back then and thus it's too slow otherwise I'd switch it on all the time.

I never bother with it either.

I tend to enable it if it makes sense for the game. Shooter where I sniper for example, as it helps me seeing minimal differences and movement, ie I use it where the AA helps me to play the game, not where it is just pure eye candy. (at 1680x1050 you don't get that many jaggies anymore normally ^^)

But normally ... heck I play on a Wii @ 480p on a 1680x1050 screen so does it make a difference ^^

I do care as it makes games look much better. I remember playing Broken Sword 3 with ATI's 6xAA and the scenes looked really good then.

Also from a developers perspective it's a easy to use feature as you don't have to do a lot to increase the image quality significantly.

I try to play all of my games at a minimum resolution of 1024x768. If I can turn the trimmings on and maintain a FPS of more than 30FPS, then they stay on. If not, they start to come off, and FSAA, AA and AF are the first things to go. If I have to lower the resolution, then AA will probably get turned back on. For me FPS matters more than pin-sharp visuals.

I always have AA turned off. That said, I very rarely play PC games.

I'd really prefer 60Hz for my FPS games so AA is off (and so are higher than 800x600 resolutions) until I get a better card.

I use AA when I can because my Vid card is only powerful enough to play most games at 800x600 or 1024x768 and on a large high res monitor the interpolation of pixels is a lot more noticeable than on a small one after the image is stretched.

My 6600GT isn't really up to it with modern games though.

I only AA when I don't have a game running at my monitor's native resolution (1280x1024) since the jaggies become much more noticeable with the hardware scaling on lower-rez.

I usually have AA at 2x on my X1900XT @ 1600x1050. I notice no performance loss and the edges are perfectly smooth at that res.

I haven't really ever noticed the effects of AA. I don't normally mind seeing jagged edges or being able to see single pixels. The only time AA bothered me was when trying to display text on a texture in a Blitz3D scene. Being unable to turn AA off, my 3D GUI engine was done for. :(

Hello.

I use AA when I fall off the wagon. Oops.

I tend to ramp settings up as much as possible and only reduce if they impact on playability.

To be fair though, I don't think there's an option for AA in Larn, so what do I know, huh?

Goodbye.

It depends on the game but more and more these days I tend to play with it on all the time or whenever available.

WoW looks HORRIBLE without AA and beautiful with it lots of other games just look ugly without it too. Half-Life 2 for example looks pretty ugly and angular without AA or AF, lovely with it. Lots of "big" development titles now expect you to use AA and look horrible without it. In days gone past the artists would have had to worry about this and spend time making it look better now the tech is there they don't bother and it shows if you don't use AA.

Basically unless you want to have to spend a lot more time with your art assets smoothing everything off nicely it makes sense to use AA.

Darkheart

i always turn it on. simply, because i do not have the hardware to play on 2560x1600 pixels ;) - i can't play on my native resolution, so theres always some blocky pixels which will be smoothed by AA.

/agree with WoW, AA makes a big difference, mainly on the character names that float above the people. I think this may also be affectedby the simplistic geometry of the game.

On where possible, though it never used to be that way.

I always wanted playability rather than looks. It still stands mostly.

Test Drive Unlimited can't run great on my laptop at uber-high res so I play it at 11x0 by 768 with AA and AF forced on with custom driver tweaks. The visuals are still awesome.

Now if only the thing didnt start overheaating and frameskip to cool down :P

Yes, some games benefit much more than others. Civ4, for example looks no different with or without it. But
Battlefield 2 looked tremendously better with it. It looked so much better and it was so beneficial, that I reduced the
texture resolution so I could crank the AA right up. When you're trying to identify little dots and details in the
distance, AA is invaluable.

AA on my system is a bit too much to ask of it. Half Life 2 is playable with 4xAA and it does look nice, but if I turn it off, it doesn't spoil my gameplay.

I had to play FEAR at 960x600 res with no AA to get a decent framerate. It only slightly detracted from the experience.

I care, I always enable max AA whenever I can, because I don't like jaggies at all.

on a 7800gtx? Sounds like i'm not missing much then....

Fear ran fine on the 6600GT with soft shadows on and at higher resolution so long as you had high res textures but not the highest and all effects on no AA. The highest quality textures basicly ran at 1/4 normal framerate.

Think that was my favourite FPS since Riddick.

Thats what I'm saying.

Fear ran great on my 6800GS, so if it struggles on the 7800GTX, i dont think i'm missing much :)

I'll only play with 4X AA on ... can't stand jaggies!

My 7800gtx struggles at 1920x1200 (my native res). Since I don't like running at anything other than native res, my only other reasonable option was to use double-pixel mode, hence 960x600.

I'm waiting for a 8800GTS equivalent speed card to be released as a single-slot device consuming less than 150W before my next upgrade. I shouldn't have splashed out the £300+ on my 7800 really, I haven't played that many 3D games since I bought it. I'm never buying a top-of-the-line video card again. I always used to buy at least 2 SKU's beneath the top-range hardware as it gave the best value for money. I'll go back to that habit in future.

AntiAlias is a *MUST* feature for ANY game. Disabling that feature will not help at all. I'm in 4XAA most of the time, and 6XAA some times. I always have Adaptive set at ON also, which enhances even more the AA modes.

..since I like it dirty, I dont care about AA long as my FPS is smooth and gameplay worth playing it...

I use 16x AA and the antiscopic filtering. I'll be honest and say I have no idea what the antiscopic filter is, what I do know is that

A) My computer can handle it
B) With these options off games look visibly poorer by comparison

Mipmapping makes a bigger difference, higher poly counts and good texturing makes a bigger difference, a lot of things are more important than AA and AS.

They do make a difference though, and whilst my PC is capable of running everything maxed out - that's exactly what i'm going to do.

However, when the time comes that I need to find a bit more performance to play whatever game I want to play, they'll be the first thing I switch off.

Until then: SLI me to max, baby :D

I don't care that much about AA, aliasing doesn't spoil my enjoyment of a game at all.

ditto, especially on consoles, older 'scart/rgb/svideo' socket CRT TVs have antialiasing 'emulation' built in :P

Basically if it works well with it on i will use it because i can (and it does look better) but if i loose playability at all, i turn it off and dont really notice its gone. I also think anything more than 1024 x 768 (1280 max!) makes everything look too sterile.