I think it does an excellent job on foilage and that kind of stuff, way better than FXAA and it does not blur the image in any way. However, it still produces some glitches, at least on my AMD card:

http://i42.tinypic.com/28vgfnr.jpg

Apart from that, some plants won't harvest properly and the steel horn helmet is always transparent.

The funny thing is that, altough I even set bTransparencyMultisampling=1 in my ini, RenderInfo.txt still states Transparency MS: no.


Is this normal?

Yes, transparency multisample is buggy, supersample gets around that but it has a much higher frame rate hit. FXAA tends to have a lot more texture shimmering, blurry and really requires sharpening to make it look decent.

I think I should be using Multisample AA already PLUS transparency AA on top of that. It works as usual, but does not handle foilage with transparent textures well. That's what transparency AA is for, I guess.

So it is known as "buggy" and no fix has been found yet? Including weird stuff like translucent steel horn helmets?

Transparency Mulitsampling is broken in Skyrim and does not work. You shouldn't force it either, because it cause transparency visual issues.
Transparency Supersampling looks good, but pretty much kills performance so it's not worth it (on my computer).
I'm not sure what Adaptive AA is.
MSAA does an OK job but at a medium high performance hit, but it doesn't do well on foilage.
FXAA costs basically 0 FPS (for me) and does a very good job on foilage and such, but things still shimmer a bit and it slightly blurs things (I think however that the blurring looks good)
SMAA work nicely and is better than FXAA and even MSAA I think, but at very little performance hit; it's incompatible with FXAA Injector mod though.

At the moment I choose FXAA, but I will probably go over to SMAA later.

The halo you see around your character is not due to AA I think but is caused by the shadow masking.
At least I see it without any special form of Transperacy AA.

Nvidia TSAA doesn't have any of those issues with Skyrim and looks great overall. Others have covered it pretty well, the main consideration now with AA if you use the official High-Res TP is VRAM so now I generally try to strike a balance for performance and image quality.

To that end, I usually run 2xMSAA+2xTSAA+FXAA as it gives me the best balance of AA, IQ and performance without too much additional jerkiness due to VRAM limitations (I hit 1.5GB usage within minutes though).

You may run into performance issues in indoor cells with Tranparency supersampling AA enabled at higher levels. This can be tested rather easily in Frostflow Lighthouse. Exteriors rarely have enough surfaces to cause a problem and foliage does indeed benefit from the setting, but some interiors make it too problematic to be used for some people.

Really, I have indeed sometimes suffered from a strange performance drop indoors altough there wasn't anything special. I guess I'll take another look at FXAA, but from what I've seen, TSAA is, by far, way superior and not very demanding.