ive never really bothered with it as i never notice much difference in most games, but when i tried super sampling aa with mass effect2 it looked amazing, does it make a big diff with skyrim, whats the best one to use that gives best picture, also whats the difference between fxaa in the skyrim settings and the fxaa post process injector are they the same thing

thanks

The FXAA injector lets you tweak it to you liking and add sharpening. Supersample AA is if you want the best fidelity but comes at a massive cost in GPU performance. A lot of games use a lot of post processing or a rendering method that doesn't support MSAA in DX9 and that's where FXAA comes in.

ok cheers mate, what do you think is the best aa for skyrim, should i use just skyrims fxaa, or use ccc adaptive or what? the reason i ask rather than check in game is that most time i cant tell any differnt, so im just wondering if im doin it wrong or not using the best settings, do you notice a big diff wen using aa in skyrim as to other games

i use http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html

yeah i

think thats nvidia isnt it? ati and nvidia use diff version i think, do you see a noticible difference with it on or off??

SMAA isn't compatible with Skyrim, it makes it's all bright. FXAA and SMAA cause a lot of texture shimmering. it's really down to what GPU you have, supersample if your GPU can take it and you like the quality, since there is really not better AA method and SGSSAA is a hit and miss affair.

works absolutely fine with me.

i dont know how it fairs with ati, but it works great on my AMD Radeon HD 6970 2GB with the AMD Catalyst 12.2 Preview Drivers.

Strange, could be some NVIDIA issue then because it's like the gamma has been turned up twice as high for me when I tried it.

I want to add, NVIDIA developed FXAA themselves...
I think SMAA was developed by a third party. Could be wrong there.

Yep, welcome to the world of even more AA modes to confuse everyone, FXAA, SMAA, MLAA.

yeah i dont get that at all, really confusing.
i just prefer smaa over fxaa because fxaa messes with the texture filtering...

hang on now im confused whats SMAA , i thought it was SSAA, super sampling aa, and adaptive and another one for ati, am i wrong?

yes.

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

For Skyrim and other games generally if it's supported, use MSAA and SSAA as it's the best quality, even more so as FXAA, SMAA are really equivalent to MSAA 4x. Some games use both because MSAA doesn't do a very good job in pure post processing, Battlefield 3 is a good example and why you can use both MSAA and FXAA and the fact that MSAA is supported in DX11 deferred rendering.

MSAA *8 from the launcher with bTransparencyMultisampling=1 setting in the ini

No because transparency mulitisampling is buggy in Skyrim, supersample is fine.

SMAA is the best AA I think when it comes to quality and performance. However, it is not compatible if you use the FXAA injector mod.

I also like FXAA. Does a really good job on foilage.

SSAA is very good quality but KILLS your performance. Not worth it.

MSAA (the AA in Skyrim) is OK, but imo it has too little effect for too much performance hit.

It's all in the detail, FXAA and SMAA, LMAA tend to soften the image too much and don't do very well on distance objects, fences and wires. Supersample pretty much does everything pin sharp, SGSSAA does a better job on shaders so you don't get texture shimmering on the decal snow and such, hence why they cost GPU power so much.

As I remember, SSAA up scales and then downscale the image to achieve it's superior quality, pretty much what they do in game promo shots where the image looks so perfect. SSAA does that in real time on the GPU and why it's so costly in performance.

after figuring out how to do SSAA with skyrim with my 7970 crossfires, and having a test, your right SSAA is superior.

Seems you have to enhance the games AA not disable it otherwise it wont work at all with ATI/AMD. Enabling enhanced though the CCC, MSAA*4 in the launcher with the CCC AA type slider to SSAA = a more stable image than msaa*8 + transparency AA from the ini , foliage is highly stable

edit: changing AA amount on the launcher resets shadows to 4096, it wasn't SSAA doing it

8* adaptive MSAA or 4*SSAA and 8192 shadows seems to fix every shadow related issue in skyrim. foliage is also stable, the outdoors 8000 distance shadows are ultra stable and look like high def shadows, instead of a mass of flickering microblocks.

GPU shadow filtering FTW.

MSAA is best of the 2 default options. 4x is a good compromise between quality and performance.

FXAA blurs the crap out of this game, I did not notice until I turned it off after having it on for 150 hours lol.