I have been reading about the smaa and fxaa and was curious which of these would be the best to use in terms of performance and quality. I have a Nvidia card and the new drivers that support fxaa. I am also using ENB and tried running the smaa with this and noticed more of a jaggy effect than with normal aa. I am pretty sure that I installed and configured everything correctly to work with ENB. Is anyone using the fxaa or smaa and if so what has been your experience with them and how do you think they compare to aa? I wouldn't mind getting a little more performance but I don't want to do it at the loss of quality. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

What is SMAA? Do you mean MSAA, which is the type of AA in Skyrim's default "anti-aliasing" setting?

I've found that disabling MSAA and using FXAA instead looks almost as good as 4x MSAA but with significantly higher frame rate. I don't use any ENB or FXAA post processing graphics mods.

Koroush Ghazi has a great http://geforce.com/optimize/guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide/#1 that goes into detail about the cost and benefit of each graphics setting.

SMAA is AMD's newest form of MLAA, or something. Apparently new tech. I prefer 4xMSAA, as Skyrim's FXAA blurs way too much, although the Vram usage and performance hit is minimal with only FXAA. I tried MLAA with the new 12.4 Catalyst drivers and their apparent 80% increase in MLAA performance, but wasn't impressed. Can't beat MSAA imo, unless you tweak FXAA up a bit with the Injector.

SMAA us a newer third party program which is supposed to look as good as 4x or 8x msaa without the performance hit. Here's a link if you want to check it out.

http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/

Morphological AA only seems to work well in DX HR on my card.......I use 4x MSAA for Skyrim modded version and 8x SSAA for my stable play version.

Whatever works best for you, of course, but I'll give my opinion

MSAA is still great despite newer forms of AA claiming to be taking the title of greatest AA ever. It provides smooth edges on geometry both near and far. It's only flaw, other than its moderate performance hit, is that it is applied before many shader effects, including those with heavy use of alpha channels, which Skyrim has a lot of. Also, it has no effect on the alpha edges of transparent textures; Grass, tree leaves, etc., but that has never bothered me.

I used SMAA for a short while, and I can say I liked it. Unfortunately, it uses a d3d9.dll file which interferes with some other features I like to use.

There's something funky about Skyrim's FXAA. For me, and many others, it undoubtedly has this overpowering blurring effect. Maybe not a bad thing for a lot of people, but it bothered me. Happily, from what I've seen, I can say nVidia's driver forced FXAA gives much tighter image quality than Skyrim's FXAA, closing in on the geometry smoothing of 4x MSAA while also effecting things like alpha channels.

I think nVidia's FXAA mixed with 4x or 2x MSAA would look fantastic, but my PC has limited horsepower. I stick with nVidia FXAA alone.

Yep FXAA is a fake way of reducing jaggies by blurring almost everything it is also overkill for BF3 in which I also use MSAA or no AA at all. Have never tried MSAA just SSAA which I love but it taxes and MLAA in DX HR looks amazing but there aren't really any other options besides FXAA which like I said to me is garbage(at least most pre packaged FXAA)

Thanks for the replies. I guess from the sound of it I will stick to MSAA.

After a little more research I got the SMAA working with my ENB properly and have to say I am impressed. It has performance comparable to FXAA yet the quality falls somewhere between 4x msaa and 8x.. I think I will be sticking with this unless I have any unforseen problems since so far it does seem to be everything they claim it is.

Glad you got it solved

Thanks. I appreciate the input.

TXAA1 is best for Nvidia's cards if yours supports it.

Thanks! Not positive if mine does but I will check it out.

Aye injectSMAA is awesome, in injector.ini change it from HIGH to ULTRA and it's about as strong as MSAA 16x.

Yeah, I really like this. I was so impressed with it I added it to several other games also and I am really happy with the results. I'm using the ULTRA setting and it looks awesome. Are you using it with any other type of AA or just by itself?

In my experience, normal Multi-Sampling AA is becoming pretty useless in modern games that use a lot of shaders, transparent textures etc.

FXAA and other post-processing "fake" AA modes look good enough to me, and they process the entire scene including leaves, shaders etc. However because they are post-processing effects, they'll never completely get rid of all the shimmering and other visual artifacts. Not a big deal IMO. There are other, more pressing issues in real-time 3D graphics than a few shimmering pixels.

I wasn't aware that you can combine FXAA with MSAA. Anyone have screens of this?

I thought they would somehow conflict with each other and either make the game look worse or render the FXAA useless.

For some reason SMAA injector gives me a performance hit. My PC is weird

There was a really good article about the whole issue... but I forgot where it is >.<

There's an example of combining the two on Koroush Ghazi's TweakGuides article. And just to be clear, we're talking about FXAA+MSAA, not SMAA.

I still like FXAA best, ever since I found out about it.
It only blurs textures a little, and costs 0 FPS, and kills most jaggies (even on foilage, which none other AA method does unless you want to half your FPS).
Things still shimmer though, although only softly.

SMAA is pretty good too, but when I just did comparison screenshots a few mins ago, I noticed practically no difference having it on/off when I already had FXAA. FXAA did too good job, so whatever SMAA did became unnoticed. It did cost about 2-5 FPS though.

MSAA cost way too much FPS for so little results imo. Not even worth using 2x MSAA.

I've tried every option, but I've ended up with the 4x AA in the Skyrim options.

No matter which AA i choose however I still get jaggies, for instance the Elder Scrolls dragon logo on the main menu always has a lot of jaggies. It almost seems like AA isn't even active. IDK what's wrong

There is actually an SMAA injector set up for ENB in an optional file of the main download folder of Stakado ENB. I contacted him to get some advice and he said he plays with only 2x enabled in the launcher and with the injector it looks as good as 16x MSAA. After trying this myself I have to agree that it looks very comparable to that with much better performance. It's a really simple install and is worth checking out for yourself. If you want to try it and you are not using ENB all you have to do is rename the d3d9_SMAA.dll file to d3d9.dll and you are good to go. He also says the SMAA by itself with no AA turned on at all is comparable to 8x. I haven't tried it alone but I really wouldn't doubt it is true. It also does NOT work with FXAA so if you have FXAA enabled you won't see any results. I was so impressed with the quality and performance that I have added SMAA to several of my games and it does make a noticeable difference. Like everything else, people have different settings and tastes but I for one am more than satisfied with the results in my game. Here's a link to Stakado ENB if anyone wants to try it for themselves. If you manually download the main file it is in the Optional folder under SMAA. It includes everything you need.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=15425

EDIT: If you want to try an even easier to use version that has a d3d9.dll for non-ENB users and one ready for ENB here is a link to a mod that has both of those.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=16233