Is anti aliasing that important?

I was looking at benchmarks and noticed that with no aa frame rates were much higher. So what I was wondering was wouldn't it be better to run no aa? Doesn't it use more vram running aa? Figured if you were gaming at 1440p or 4k that the picture would be more crisp anyway.

I turn it off when having frame rate issues, i dont really notice in some games

Anti-Aliasing is very demanding and is probably the first thing you should turn down/off when struggling to run a game smoothly. However, it plays a vital role in reducing jagged edges and noticeably improves image quality.

There are some modern techniques that have a much smaller performance cost than traditional multi-sampling that you could try (e.g. FXAA, MLAA)

It's not so bad to go without on PC because you are running high res on a smaller screen i.e. 1920x1080 (or higher) on a 22-27" screen.

Its critical for them crummy consoles because they are running usually lower than that i.e. 1280x720 on a 40" or larger screen.

I usually just run without AA. Frame rate is more important to me than jaggies I will hardly ever notice because stuff is usually moving so fast.

Once I got a resolution around 1024 x 768 I stopped noticing its affects. So to me, no, it's not that important.

You must ether have poor eye sight or sit more then 4 feet from the screen

I only like true AA, other types make the picture less sharp which is a big turnoff for me. But I got a 1080p/21.5" monitor, so even without AA the picture looks good. I can notice the jaggies but it's ok.

at 1080p or more most games look fine without it. Most people who obsess over AA are OCD and get all anal if they see any small imperfections.

I think at 1080p and below, it is still pretty important to the overall experience. At 1440p and up, it starts to become negligible and not worth the performance hit and input lag. I rarely use it at 1440p and I only use MSAA when I do. No sense in blurring the image with other AA methods. AA is supposed to improve the image, not make it looks worse.

Only you can answer what graphics features are more important to you. You can tweak any number of things to improve framerate: lower resolution, lower details, lower/no AA, etc. Personally I'd cut AA before the other things because you'll get a big performance boost with, in my opinion, only mild visual quality downgrade at 1080p+. But if you hate those jaggies, then it's not up to us to overrule your preference - in that situation leave the AA on and cut some other stuff back to get desired framerates. It's the beauty of PC: this stuff is all optional and you get to pick what works best for your tastes

This. Personally on a 1440p monitor I can live without it and it's the first feature I turn off when trying to boost my performance but it's entirely a matter of personal preference. Some users on this forum refuse to play with AA off because they think it looks too bad, even at a very high resolution.

-Byshop

It depends how big your monitor is, the resolution, how close you're sitting, etc. Also depends how much jaggies and shimmering sticks out to you. It sticks out to me like a sore thumb, so I always use AA at any resolution, even higher than 1440P. 1440P is usually for bigger screens, so typically the pixel density isn't high enough to eliminate or hide jaggies in any way compared to 1080P. A 23" 1440P monitor would appear less jaggy than a 23" 1080P monitor, but a 27" 1440P monitor would probably be on the same level as a 23" 1080P in terms of jagginess. On my buddies 1440P 27" monitor, which we seat a couple of feet from, jaggies are just as visible as 1080P, so he uses AA. Or even on my 24" 1200P monitor, I use DSR in the majority of my games to play at 1697P (weird rez), and I still like to have at least 2x AA and some post processing AA because the games are still a bit jaggy, despite the rez being much higher than 1440P.

Just about in any sort of situation, you're likely going to want at least some post-processing AA if you don't like jaggies and shimmering. If you don't mind jaggies or shimmering that much, you don't really need AA at all.

I haven't had any game that required me to turn AA off since I got a 780 Ti.

It really depends on what resolution you play at.
If it's 1080P or below then you should use AA.
If you're playing at 1440P - 4K then it's not really necessary.

Keep in mind that AA is often not as expensive as increasing resolution. The general idea at the time was that the game would look as good as higher resolutions and run better. Over time that has become "remove the jaggies" which is certainly valid. There are many forms of AA, MSAA is pretty expensive.Things like SMAA are cheap and look pretty good as well. Super Sampling is one of the best ways to remove jaggies because you are running at a higher resolution, but it can cost heavily.

I haven't gamed at 4k, but I am assuming that AA probably isn't needed. I personally can tolerate no AA at 1080p most of the time but would prefer it on.

What is your resolution? What is the most GPU heavy game you play? Also, what is your minimum acceptable fps? 780 Ti is a great card, but there are games that it can not max while maintaining a minimum 60 fps.

Depends. Some games just can't get enough AA. Crysis 3 seems to have jaggies even with max AA while other games seem to do fine with lesser AA (eg Far Cry 3).

But, yeah. AA is the first thing I disable to get framerates back.

Sometimes, I'll apply AA via Nvidia Control Panel while at other times, I'll let the game do it. It all depends on which method is the lesser hog.

for me its one of the first settings to be reduced/turned off if i am having performance issues.

im not really fussy on jaggies.

To me its the most important thing there is. Good shadows, shaders, lighting, textures but no AA makes the whole image plain ugly. Jaggied shadows are teh worst

@silversix_:

depends on res and screen size.

at 1080...anything at 27" or more then yes it's needed.

At 1440 it's a nice convenience but less important.

I have a 24", 1080p. Cannot play without AA. Now of course if the only AA option is shitty FXAA, its better to play with jaggies than a vaseline layer on screen but then we have sweetfx which i use in pretty much every game that supports it.

Jaggies are a sickness that dwarfs pop-in in terms if awfulness. **** jaggies. Goddamn eyesores.

Neither

Yes, AA is a must even at 1440p. If theres ever a game that just doesn't run well I at least run a post process AA or force FXAA through the Control Panel. But pretty much with my setup I don't need to skimp on AA and I paid extra for that. Now when playing my 3DS I really notice the aliasing, but forgive it as thats the only way to play the games and I have no choice. To me the biggest difference in old games is higher res with AA. Mass Effect look so much better with a higher res and FXAA (I would force MSAA or SSAA but it never seems to work for the Mass Effect games).

AA is on, at least for me on 1080p 23' monitor

That's an odd assumption. PC gamers only use small screens and only console gamers use large screens? Eh, I never knew. I hope I don't get in trouble for breaking some sort of law.

What's the best AA to use that wouldn't drop frame rates a lot and would still give off a good picture? Would 2aa remove jaggies enough and not drop frame rates as bad as 4aa?

I find 2xMSAA on a 22" 1080p screen removes 90% of jagged edges.

@kraken2109: Well il be gaming on either a 24" 144hz 1080p monitor, or a 27" 144hz 1440p monitor, and using a GTX 970.

There's a difference between 1440p and 1080p, for 1080p the recommended AA is x4 while on 1440p is x2 at most.

At least that's what I recommend

I use MLAA, it doesn't effect performance like AA, and doesn't cause blur like FXAA. But i generally keep it off when gaming on 1080p res or above.

Get the 1440P monitor if you're concerned about it. At 1080P I typically find myself wanting a minimum of 4x AA. At higher resolutions (like 1440P), 2x AA does a good job cleaning up the majority of jaggies, but I'd still be using 4x AA in addition to any post-processing AA available if you've got the framerate to spare (most games). The extra AA is the difference between an image with slightly noticeable jagged edges versus CGI-quality picture.

But in the end it's a preference for whatever balance meets your image-quality and FPS desires. 1440P would be nice because a lot of games are using deferred rendering, meaning that adding MSAA isn't even an option, so you'll benefit from the additional PPI. And above all, if you're spending money on the rig to produce high-end graphics, you shouldn't cheap out on the monitor. Cheap PC monitors, no matter what resolution or framerate, don't look good. The majority of monitors floating around out there have distinctly poor IQ, looking like utter crap compared to something like a Plasma TV. Ignore Newegg reviews, ask around on display-centric forums, read professional reviews, etc.

i use SMAA usually if i can get a graphic injector like Sweetfx to work in a game... it has very little performance hit.

Some newer games don't need much or any AA though cause they have built in techniques that take the edges off and sometimes AA is totally useless to use in those cases

I never turn it on until I'm playing a very old game where I know that it won't effect the performance. 1080p and high settings with no anti aliasing are enough for me.

@Old_Gooseberry: do u notice a performance hit/difference between SMAA & MLAA ?

i notice a few fps hit with SMAA when i activate it in Sweetfx. And visually it takes out the same amount of aliasing as 2xMSAA, but with standard 2x multisampling AA i notice maybe twice or three times loss in fps compared to SMAA.

I've never used MLAA before, but I've used other ones like FXAA and TXAA and even though they maybe slightly perform slightly fractionally better than SMAA, i think SMAA looks the best... FXAA a lot of the time blurs everything too much.

So i doubt theres much performance difference between SMAA and MLAA. But from what i've read MLAA is similar to FXAA and will cause bluring to achieve antialiasing while SMAA will not. SMAA if you ask me is the best AA you can use if you want to remove some jaggies and have minimal performance hit.

Honestly, at 1440, I really don't see any jaggies. 27". At 1080? Yeah...They are there.

4k...absolutely not.

yes, AA impacts performance quite a bit. then again, 1440p or 4K impacts performance even more than AA on 1080p. so... choice is yours. i pesonally use smaller 22" screen, so i don't need more than 1080p. this is also good since i don't need to make SLI setups for max graphics settings.

if you want bigger screen, then you must go for atleast 1440p. be prepared to go SLI/Crossfire.

1440 @ 27" is the same pixel density than 1080p @ 21". atleast with my 22" fullhd i can see jaggies without AA.

not at 4k,at least not in most games

at 4k I don't notice any jaggies with aa off