I have been reading up a bit and I am seeing some people stating that AA is almost pointless when using a 1080p resolution. So I was hoping to gather some opinions from some of the knowledgeable people on here.

Personal tolerances will give you a range of answers. For people who like to make cool screenshots, AA is a must. For just diving in a playing, not as much. For some, a jaggy will induce a seizure.

It will also come down to your monitor size...1080p on a 62" screen will look vastly different than 1920x1080 on a 22" monitor, and the impact will be more noticeable on the bigger screen.

Personally, I am bothered by the jaggies with no AA, but I'm not too picky and will apply very mild AA, because fps is more important to me...but you'll get a hundred different opinions on this.

Check out http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1340188-downscaling-your-resolution-to-simulate-aaanyone-doing-this-with-nvidia/page__view__findpost__p__20195869post to see a few 1920x1080 AA pics...

I have been trying higher levels of AA forced in the control panel since the beta. I had been using the FXAA in the launcher and nothing else. Now I'm using 8CSAA with TrAA set to muttisample. Colors look more vibrant and rocks have more definition which is strange as I would have thought this had nothing to do with anti-aliasing. Could be I had too many trips with Mr. Natural in my youth.

That's not true at all unless the person had a blurry monitor.

I don't really have the horsepower for AA, because I much prefer staying as close to 60FPS as possible. This is a fast past game with action, and I don't like my framerate to drop when things get intense. I am particularly sensitive to framerate changes or choppy framerate. I much prefer smooth framerate to smoothing on edges.

I also prefer high quality textures, rather than smoothing on low quality textures. So there are some trade-offs.

Some people are fine with 30FPS, and would rather have the image quality. 2x AA is really nice, if you can afford it. Obviously, more is better.

FXAA is faster, less accurate version of AA, but it blurs the screen too much for my liking, and still has a slight peformance hit. So, I don't use that either.

Try it with multiple settings and see where you're happiest. Right now, I'm running at 4x, and that's because it's hard for me to tell any difference between that and 8x. I get a little better performance that way, too, but my system is still fairly "high end," so I was doing okay at 8x. Since I don't notice the difference that much, I'll take the smoother running 4x.

To be honest, I see ZERO difference with AA on or off. And I play on both my 22 inch plasma monitor and my 46 inch LCD HDTV. I have been kind of wondering if AA for Skyrim is somewhat busted for certain setups. Regardless if I run it through my video card or through game settings I see ZERO difference. Everyone has a small glow around them that you can especially see when they are near a dark area.

Main place i notice it is the front posts, out front of Warmaidens. The posts that hold up the roof hangover, have stairstepping without AA.

That alone makes me jealous. But, again, I prefer the game to be blistering fast.

I will go take a look at that right now. Will be back with findings.

If you look at shiney edges on stairs are they smooth? I see varying levels of banding when I pan left or right. In Riften the leaves on the ground will flicker depending upon the settings I select. The 8CSAA seems to due this less.

8x AA http://i40.tinypic.com/kaiiro.jpg

0x AA http://i40.tinypic.com/24e6wlv.jpg

I do see a very faint difference. I really had to strain to see it though.

So, onto another question. For someone running on one AMD Radeon HD 6870 1gb card (without crossfire on because they GPU manufacturer are complete cat turds) what is my best way of tweaking my AA? CCC, in game settings, or third party software?

Also, if not through in game, what settings would work well on the alternative?

Thanks again for all the help!

I think it is more pronounced from further away, actually. From certain angles.

At 45 degrees, the stepping isn't as bad. At 90 degrees, it would be perfectly vertical, and so there are no jaggies. When you get it at a certain angle, there just isn't a pixel that it can put there, so it has a jaggy line.

Take a look at this: http://www.mathleague.com/help/geometry/IMG00036.GIF

Not only does this show the angles I'm talking about, but you can actually see the stair-stepping. It's worse looking at certain angles, you see?


On to your next question, I can't help, I don't use AMD

I have a 30" monitor and at 2560x1600, anti-aliasing does not produce any visible benefits. I might turn it on if I wanted to take a screenshot, but even then I doubt I'd notice a major difference. On a large format display running at "only" 1920x1080, the individual pixel size is larger, so running without anti-aliasing will be much more noticeable.

discussing resolution without size of the screen being mentioned is pointless.


It's about Pixels per square inch... or the number of pixels crammed into a signal display dimension. DOT PITCH would also be another form of measurement.. although typically this was the space between each pixel on a given screen....

Lets say you have a 20" 1080p screen... enabling FSAA on a screen like that would be less benefitial than someone say playing on a 40" at 1080p.... essentially you've doubled the width and height of the screen.... which means the amount of noticeable jagged or lets call it Stair casing is far more clear. Double that screen size again keeping the same 1080p resolution 80" .... it would be like a soar thum in your face... actually at about 80"... your pinkynail would be about the size of a single pixel lol.


I run a 50" @ 3240x1920.... that's 6,220,800 pixels... 3x the amount that 1080p... has a pixel density of 75.32

a 50" @ 1920x1080 (which is 1080p) that has 2,073,600 pixels... the pixel density of 44.06

a 20" @ 1920x1080..... has a pixel density of 110.15

a 80" @ 1920x1080 has a pixel density of 27.54

a 80" @ 3840x2160 (this is the new standard 2160p) has a pixel density of 55.07

See.... as you can likely decern from the above numbers.... the higher the pixel density.. the higher the quality and the less likely FSAA will be a needed or even noticeable function.

Typically.. we should also factor in that depending on how close you sit to the screen will also play into this number.

The accepted number is usually no less than 40 for a pixel density at about 5 feet.... this is a debateable figure .. but a few people i've discussed this with... we've somewhat agreed that the best pixel density is this..

this is why it's not recommended to buy a tv larger than 55" running 1080p to sit within 5 feet of it unless you plan on running at least a few levels of FSAA to get rid of the noticeable Staircasing effect.

one of the very reasons that most manufacturers had for a short time drawn the line at 52/55" for the larger tvs.... but are making way with the adoption of 2160p which meets the density required for much larger screens.

oh btw.. if you want to figure out your pixel density..

heres a good tool

http://thirdculture.com/joel/shumi/computer/hardware/ppicalc.html

Just punch in your resolution your running and the size of your screen... and violla it'll tell you the density.

Here's a comparsion I made quickly, resolution is at 1600x900. Go to Brinehammer wreck if you wanna see some aliasing.

No AA:
http://i42.tinypic.com/4lm4na.jpg
MSAA 8x:
http://i42.tinypic.com/n5sx0h.jpg
FXAA:
http://i42.tinypic.com/2nv3swg.jpg
SMAA:
http://i40.tinypic.com/2zi4ltg.jpg

There are some places on screen where having no AA will look horrible.

The tops of buildings. With no AA you'll see a stairway effect, especially in whiterun.

Wooden planks used as steps to buildings look horrible with no AA.

Without AA forests won't be as sharp.

However saying that, if you can't afford the frames you can probably live without it. Aside from BF3, I use AA in all my games. I lose 10fps in bf3 with 2xaa, so it's just not worth it. But you'll find in nearly all games you can manage at least 2xaa on a decent enough card.

it needs to be applied through the game not ccc. i think the af will go either way.

I was kind of wondering why I got an extra 25fps when running it through my CCC. Guess it is not working?

If you do not see jaggies with no AA set in Skyrim, maybe you have AA on your video card drivers turned on?

Depends on your monitor size, but even more than that it depends on how sensitive you are to jagged edges. Run the game and decide for yourself.

I always play games with AA on and wouldn't have it any other way because I want the best fidelity I can have.

AA actually reduces fidelity, but perhaps you don't really mean fidelity.

No it doesn't, it improves the rendered image by removing aliasing, hence improving fidelity and it also removes texture shimmering.

It's not just about pixel density. With AA off, when I move the character, I get a very noticeable shimmering around the edges that are high contrast. This happens, because that edge OS sometimes dark and sometimes light as you move. This is greatly reduce by applying AA, as that edge is always uniformly blurred. This is going to be beneficial on monitors with high pixel density.

Take a look at a console game with no AAAA. You will see lots of shimmering at edges no matter how far you sit back from the TV, and how small the pixels are.

See this video of AA versus no AA side by side to see what I mean.

http://youtu.be/NqBN1YkfEyg

@ OP .

Saw your pic in Whiterun (warmaidens?) and thought ..my game don't look like that....

http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee72/camaro_69_327/Skyrim%202012/ScreenShot7.jpg

Wonder if thats...Nvidia verses AMD.....Mods verses No mods? Hmmmm