MSAA Application control or no to Application control

[BBloke]

I make no bones about it I've been in the ATI graphics card camp since I left my nVidia 4600 AGP card some years back. I've never been keen on nVidia's style of control panel but now there does seem a be theme between to the two.

Anyway, I digress. The reason for the post is to ask whether you use in game Anti-aliasing or in game. (This can also be said for anisotropic filtering.

The title shows the setting for ATI cards so please forgive my nVidia ignorance.

I decided to have a look at a couple of my games and see what all the fuss and difference was about. The two games I had chance to change were Dirt 2 and F1 2010.

I've changed my Graphics Card settings from 4xAA(16x sampled) and 8x AF down to application controlled and ran check in game settings and changed it's AA offering up to 8x.

Dirt 2 was already set with everything to Ultra, 1680 x 1050 res. Ran the benchmark with in game AA at 8x. End result was: Minimum 46fps, Overall 56 fps

I did the same with F1 and found: End result was: Minimum 42fps, Overall 47 fps.

I paid more attention to F1 when checking the screen for jagged lines and I couldn't see any. To tell you truth I didn't notice anything that I would consider damaging to game play where visuals were concerned.

So, how have you got yours setup and is there any pros/cons to either method.

I'll be setting more games up this way to see what happens so I'll update the figures when I get chance.

If you find any relevant web pages relating to this then please post em up.

[Flynnstone]

I've been a longtime ATI user. I currently have a 4850 which is holding its own quite a bit longer than I had thought it might. Having used ATI for ages I generally kept away from aa of any form because I found it had a tendency to crash games. With the 4850 though it seems to be more stable, I leave it as application controlled and normally set it to 2 in game....its not exactly a power house of a card but at 2 I generally don't notice too much of a performance decrease.

ATI drives have come a long way, their linux ones are even usable these days.

[JJzer0]

Nvidia's control Panel used to be able to be "expanded" by third party utilities, so that you could force (for instance) monitor refresh rates, which are a must for me as I still use a diamondtron based IIyama CRT based monitor. Now the Nvidia interface does very little compared to what it used to be able to do.

However I'm still an Nvidia fan after having so much hassle with cards such as the Radeon 32DDR way on in the past (which I often found a different ATI driver was required between games)
I usually prefer to let the game graphics options set my card (GTX465) preferences as it's the only real way to be assured what features can be altered an have an effect.

I'll check the fps differences in using different levels of AA & AF in a particular game whilst monitoring and see what looks best and is most stable with a particular game and driver. Of course that changes with display resolution which I tend to have a 1600x1200.

[Avenging]

I'am still running a agp gainward bliss 7900GS with Anti-aliasing amd anisotropic filtering on and don't suffer from much fsp degradation.