I don't know how many of you are familiar with SMAA so I thought I would post this as a heads up to those of you who haven't heard of it. SMAA is antialiasing with the performance of FXAA and much, much better quality. It only has a 1 or 2 frame hit yet looks incredible. You can use it alone with no other AA enabled and get the quality of 8x MSAA using just the SMAA injector. Or you can use 2x in the Skyrim launcher and the quality is comparable to 16x MSAA. I was so impressed that I added this to several of my other games with great results. With the performance of FXAA (minus the vaseline on the screen effect) and the quality of at least 8x MSAA you can't go wrong with this. The only thing this does not work with is FXAA and RCRN. Other than that it is compatible with everything else. Do yourself a favor and give this a try. Everyone I know that has tried it is very pleased with the results. It is a super easy install (and uninstall, how dare you!) so it is worth trying. Here's a link to an SMAA injector that has a d3d9.dll for non-ENB users and one set up for ENB. The quality and performance are more than worth it.

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

Ive been on and off of them but recently started using it. Is the link you provided the same smaa injector as this one?
http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html

That one I have been using. It actually does give me a performance hit in Skyrim but I think I may of found out why so I will test it again later on.

Also, someone from the comments mentioned that 12.4 improved performance for smaa, I am on 12.3 still after hearing bad things about 12.4. Thoughts?

12.4 ATI drivers I mean

Yes, that's the same one. I'm not sure what changes (if any) the poster of the Nexus link made but the performance hit for myself and the people I know who are using it is minimal so you may want to give this one a try. As far as the drivers go I am using Nvidia so I am not really sure about that but I do know if you update to the 12.4 and have any issues it's easy to roll back to the 12.3.

I use SMAA in pretty much everything now a days, best AA out there that everyone can use ATM.

FXAA is good but only when tweaked, otherwhile... BLURFEST lol.

For Skyrim I use the game's FXAA + RCRN's, looks good

Does it work with MSAA x4?
I think SMAA only is not enough for good quality without any MSAA, but its great alternative to TRSS, which has large amount of performance hit and input lag.

injectSMAA may not be compatible with any other aa methods. It is clearley stated on website.

I noticed that too and was wondering when Stakado said to use them together. I'm going to get back in touch with him and see if he has any more information about that. It does seem like he would have had to make a lot of changes in order to make them work together. I do know that there is a definite difference in my game but I will see what else I can find out about his suggestion to use them together.

Ive done a test. SMAA stacks with Multisampling AA, and even with Transparency Supersampling.
SMAA on Ultra has performance hit like MSAAx4 or even worse.
At some areas SMAA even better than MSAAx8, but at another areas such as ladders it looks like "noAA" at all.
Its really much better then FXAA, but requires more resources as well, and has not enough quality to play without MSAA.

Screenshots:
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/7559/smaaultra.png
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/3978/msaax4trssx2.png
http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1717/smaaultramsaax4trssx2.png

Interesting. I do know that there is a problem with the Steam overlay that affects SMAA's quality and performance. If you go in the injector ini and change weird_steam_hack to 1 it fixes this issue. Sorry I forgot to mention that before.

In the install notes it states to turn set your GPU's AA to "off" but in CCC I don't see an option for that. Will clicking the checkbox for Application Settings and then putting iMultiSample=0 in the SkyrimPrefs.ini work or do I need to do something else?

Its enough.

I've noticed, that SMAA really has no performance hit in most places with low amount of vegetation.
If there is a lot of vegetation on the screen (tall grass, dead trees, some sort of furry-modeled trees), it began to utilize much more resources (equal as 4x MSAA or 2x TRSS like i said before).

You can check it yourself. All you need to do is compare FPS differences in the city and then in the forest. You can use Pause/Break button to toggle SMAA on fly.

Hey Staind716, saw your comment on the nexus
I posted the SMAA injector to reddit but they don't seem to dig it. Was gonna post it here too but you beat me to it.

The injector is working great for me.

Lol. It's a shame how few people are actually trying this because the vast majority of people that I know have tried it are very happy with the results. Just trying to get the word out more because this deserves much more attention that what it is getting.

+1

yeah i just tried it out the other night, after seeing your post here. It looked ok with he fxaa....but i went back to 4x ssaa. the ssaa just looked a bit sharper. still nice though, performance was good!

Tried it out. It's less blurry than the default FXAA, but many edges don't appear to be getting alias'd, such as fences and distant objects, lots of flickering. I find that even 2xMSAA wins over FX or SM in terms of quality and performance, personally. I'd use 4xMSAA but don't have enough Vram with the HD texture pack + mods.