So, I have a Radeon HD 5800 series (can't remember the exact card, yeah I svck. The highest end out of the 5800 series). 9 gigs of ram and a quad core i7.

My graphics card is my biggest downfall in Skyrim playing, but I'm confused about some of the tweaking, and wondering if the forum can explain.

So : I recently restarted, but this time picked up a boatload of "make skyrim prettier" mods, INCLUDING ENB. ENB is running on a "performance" setup though.

Anyways, the core of my question is this : I have AA disabled in Skyrim settings, but everything else set to Ultra at 1080p.

If I go into CCC to fool around with settings myself, interesting things happen...

1) Morphological Filtering, in my opinion, looks the best, but makes the game pretty much not work at all (like, 4 FPS outdoors, as opposed to 30 normally).
2) This is the confusing part.. it SEEMS like I can simply set AA settings wherever I want other than Morphological, and they work fine, with minimal drop. Yes, I'm talking 8x Edge Detect with Super Sampling.
This is confusing to me because I can't 100% tell if it's making a difference, I THINK it is, but it might be placebo. I have the settings set specifically for TESV.exe, I've reset Skyrim/my PC, but no changes.
On the other hand, I can simply Alt+Tab out to swap Morphological on/off. So why aren't other types of AA dinging my performance? Am I doing something wrong?

I had 5850s (dual, Xfire) up until just a week ago. I always left the CCC settings default, and didn't want the framerate hit that upgraded tex would produce. The game's default setting for my two cards was "high," and turning off AA was a nice way to improve framerates that were already decent. Now I upgraded to dual 7870s and the framerate is no better, and I have an annoying stutter too. I am still using "high" gfx setting in the game, setting to ultra slows the framerates too slow! FYI.