Does Anyone NOT use 16xAF?

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TwistedMetalGear

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I was just reading a thread where someone had a tri-SLI setup and was doing Crysis benchmarks with 16xAA and *gasp* 8xAF. Why would you go all out on AA and only use half the power of AF?

In my experience, AF has almost no hit on performance at all, even at the full 16x. I've only done benchmarks for a few select games, but the difference between no AF and 16xAF was only 0-3 fps as I recall. Granted, I was only running these benchmarks at 1280x1024, so maybe AF eats more performance as resolution rises. Someone fill me in!

But AF, IMO, is more important than AA even. If you were to turn it off, you would realize that your game has turned into a blurry mess. It's like time traveling back to 1998. :p
 
I always use 16x AF. I am big into image quality. And with todays video cards, AF doesn't have that much of a hit, at all.

Either that, or they got the numbers transposed. It may have been 8x AA and 16x AF.
 
to me the higher the res, the less AA you need... doesnt AF work more on things like edges of buildings, grass, rounding corners off and such?
 
To me, the difference between 8x and 16x AF is almost impossible to see in gameplay, so I stick with 8x. Same thing with AA; I find the difference beyond 4x difficult to see in gameplay, so I usually don't go beyond that.

That said, if I'm taking screenshots or capturing frames for a render, I'll crank everything up to the maximum.
 
MrGuvernment said:
to me the higher the res, the less AA you need... doesnt AF work more on things like edges of buildings, grass, rounding corners off and such?
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You are confusing AF with AA. AA works like you explained, smoothing the edges of buildings, grass, rounding corners off and such.

AF makes the texture away from the player sharper.
 
To me Crysis feels like it takes a decent hit with 16x af so to smooth things out i might use 8x but i don't play it anymore anyway, and this is on a 8800gtx at 1280x1024 high settings with 2xaa, With my other newer games though i always use 16x af (UT3, COD4)
 
oshia86 said:
To me Crysis feels like it takes a decent hit with 16x af so to smooth things out i might use 8x but i don't play it anymore anyway, and this is on a 8800gtx at 1280x1024 high settings with 2xaa, With my other newer games though i always use 16x af (UT3, COD4)
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Set "edgeaa = 2" in autoexec.ini instead of using 2x FSAA, still takes care of most of the jaggies without nearly the performance hit of 2x FSAA.
 
oshia86 said:
To me Crysis feels like it takes a decent hit with 16x af so to smooth things out i might use 8x but i don't play it anymore anyway, and this is on a 8800gtx at 1280x1024 high settings with 2xaa, With my other newer games though i always use 16x af (UT3, COD4)
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Crysis takes a hit with anything :rolleyes:
 
I don't play with AF unless a game defaults to enabling it. However, I'm still running a 7950GT, so I'm more worried about playing at native res in some games now than trying to boost IQ :)
 
bubomatic5 said:
Crysis takes a hit with anything :rolleyes:
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Sure does, its fun when i want to show off to my friends but thats about it. I also forgot that i also use transparency supersampling all of the time to. The af seems to take just as big of a hit as more aa to me, it might be all in my head though, aa slows things down and af makes it jerk alot.
 
With angle dependent AF most of the time you're getting 4-8x AF regardless of what you set.
 
All the newish cards default to angle-independent (or, more accurately, almost angle-independent), unless I'm mistaken.
 
I have 16xAF forced to override any application settings :D. It's true that 8x->16x isn't much, but the performance hit is tiny.
 
I'm also in the 8xAF group just to skimp on a little xtra performance elsewhere.
 
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