AF/FXAA/SMAA for old card

[doveman]

For my friend, who's only got a 512MB 4770, I'm wondering which, if any, of AF/FXAA/SMAA he should be able to use. I'm going to disable AA for him, as not only is that likely to cause an FPS drop but it considerably adds to VRAM usage as well.

 

I think SMAA is better than FXAA but as RCRN uses FXAA I'm not sure it's possible, or advisable, to use them together, particularly if he's using the antilag d3d9.dll (haven't tested that myself yet to see if it helps at all).

 

As for AF, I don't think that adds to VRAM usage but I'm not sure how much strain it puts the GPU under.

[stoppingby4now]

I've tried SMAA and I believe it to offer better quality than FXAA. I've never tried to use it with RCRN, so I'm not 100% sure, but I don't see why it couldn't be used as long as there was a way to proxy it with RCRN.

 

But, if it's a low end card (I'm not that familiar with ATI cards), RCRN may not be right for your friend. He'd probably be better off using RLwC and either using the in-game FXAA, or standalone SMAA.

 

AF will affect performance as well, just not as bad as AA. You'll have to experiment and see what kind of performance gains you can get by lowering it (assuming it's bad with 16x).

[doveman]

Yeah, 4770 is pretty low end. Probably was mid-range when he bought it!

 

You may be right that RCRN, with it's postprocessing, will be too much for it though and I don't want to be changing mods again once he's re-started the game, having read and been terrified by the troubleshooting guide. Probably RLwC and standalone SMAA will be best for him but if the SMAA dll can't be chained with the antilag dll (assuming the latter's useful) it'll have to be RLwC and ingame FXAA.

 

I thought AF probably did have some performance impact. It's certainly a lot less than AA in my experience, but I have a good card so I don't know what it's like on a low-end card. He can experiment with AF I guess as it won't mess up the game, which changing mods can.

[Besidilo]

Most modern cards handle AF without any issues. If performance drops whilst using it, reduce it from 16x to 8x and you should be good to go.

 

Textures filtering is definitely something that's noticeable in games like Skyrim.

 

I prefer SMAA to FXAA, the latter blurs the image too much. Neither is perfect but it's a nice post processing effect that has negligible performance impact.

 

It all really depends on the resolution you play at.

[doveman]

Most modern cards handle AF without any issues. If performance drops whilst using it reduce it from 16x to 8x and you should be good to go.Textures filtering is definitely something that's noticeable in games like Skyrim.I prefer SMAA to FXAA, the latter blurs the image too much. Neither is perfect but it's a nice post processing effect that has negligible performance impact.It all really depends on the resolution you play at.

OK thanks, I'll get him to try 16x AF and 8x if necessary. He'll be playing at 1366x768 (his TV's native res).

[Besidilo]

 

Most modern cards handle AF without any issues. If performance drops whilst using it reduce it from 16x to 8x and you should be good to go.Textures filtering is definitely something that's noticeable in games like Skyrim.I prefer SMAA to FXAA, the latter blurs the image too much. Neither is perfect but it's a nice post processing effect that has negligible performance impact.It all really depends on the resolution you play at.

OK thanks, I'll get him to try 16x AF and 8x if necessary. He'll be playing at 1366x768 (his TV's native res).

 

That shouldn't be an issue then, you can always try reducing or optimising the textures and overclocking the card's memory, if necessary.