I have a top end rig.

Phenom II x 6, 8 gigs ram, radeon 6950 2 gig, etc...

I was getting HORRIBLE performance on ultra. I fooled with all the settings going back and forth and found that nothing worked for me until i found that all I had to do was TURN AA DOWN TO 4x instead of 8x.

So, i use ULTRA SETTINGS WITH AA AT 4x. Performs like a dream.

Make sure in your ATI Catalyst you have everything set to USE APPLICATION SETTINGS. I hope that this can help some people that are struggling.

-Jason

Yeah, I found 4x AA and 8x AF was the sweet spot for me, through the CCC.

I have a 5850, and something on ULTRA is too much for me and even the Bethesda logo chugs, but I'm getting really good performance with "High" settings at 1920x1080.

Also, I found using the "adaptive AA" setting in the CCC caused weird transparency issues. Setting it back to 'multisample' cleared that up.

just bumping this for others to see.

I tried switching between AA off, AF 16x to AA 8x and AF off, and both full at AA 8x and AF 16x.

Didn't really notice that much of a difference in FPS drops. Maybe 2-3.

What did it for me was changing shadow detail from Ultra down to high. My FPS increased with 10-12.

i5 2500K
Geforce 560 TI
4gb ram

It baffles me why someone using 1920x1080 res. would even think of using AAx8 or even 4.

I use that resolution and don't use AA. However, I do usa FXAA, not so much for the AA effect but more for the general shader effect is has, I really really like it.

And it increases my performance. Yay.

Why? I can get a steady 60 FPS easy at max settings 1080P 4xAA on most games. Metro 2033, Crysis 2, Witcher 2, etc. And these are in DX11.

The only reason I can't do the same for Skyrim in DX9 is that it's optimized for consoles, not the PC.

It's not about whether you can run the game at these settings, but about the difference in visual quality - the higher the resolution the lower the AA setting is required to smoothe the jaggies. I play at 1920x1080 and I see no discernible difference between AA set to 8x and 4x. Not to mention that some jaggies are "immune" to AA used in game.