antialiasing/ anistrophic filtering

wat exactly is antialiasing/ anistrophic filtering? will doom3 will look better with 4xAA/8xAF 2xAA/8xAF or 0xAA/0xAF? with an ati radeon X800 XT pci express

Antialiasing is the term for smoothing along the edges of polygons to make it look like the picture is not made out of pixels.

Anisotropic filtering is a way of smoothing textures that are further away from you to prevent moire (think of the matrix where you see the camera zoom in on those monitor screens), while still retaining overall image sharpness. Basically its mipmapping on steroids.

Both of them increase image quality, however anti aliasing is pretty useless at most resolutions unless you have eyes like a hawk. AF on the other hand, is a pretty good thing, since it gets rid of those ugly blurry circles that usually surrounded you throughout the whole of 1999.

kk thx alot
so doom will look fine if it ran 2xAA/8xAF?

No, it will look terrible with 2xAA/8xAF. Also, the best card to play it with is a GFMX440.

doom 3 will look good if you have aa and af off if you have a x800xt pci-e. the higher the aa and af the better the game will look but will run slower the higher the setting

Unless you're seriously anal about the "staircasing" effects exhibited by diagonal edges in 3D games, AA is totally useless. It costs too much in terms of performance.

As for the ansitropic filtering, I usually leave it off. I never notice the difference anyway.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21136

Hmm, playing most games @1024x768 (on 19" CRT) I can clearly notice the differnece between 0xAA and 4xAA.
I only have a Ti4200 (well, I love this card but its a little outdated :/), so its not possible to run the latest games with AA or AF but I really prefer to play all the older stuff with it activated.
Just posting this cause I found it odd that nost people don't seem to care about AA :P

I always play at 4xAA and 16xAF. And I kind of like the combination of a low resolution and high AA sometimes, makes things look more like digital 2D art rather than 3d models. =P

Espi said:

I kind of like the combination of a low resolution and high AA sometimes, makes things look more like digital 2D art rather than 3d models. =P

Heh, Im not the only one (two)

I have a rather linguistical question: How do you pronounce Anti-Aliasing?

the ant-i like in "spy" or like in "bee" ?

the aliasing like in "Alien" or like in "ad-mire" ?

sorry for that question here.

It should be pronounced anti-a-lie? ;)

It's pronounced Ant Eye A lee asing

"ANN tee AY lee uh sing"