PCA Forums

What is AA and Aniso and how do you enable it or disable it? I first saw this about a day ago.

AA is short for Anti-Aliasing
Anti-Aliasing is used per pixel to fill-in the jagged edges of lines and smooth the appearance of curves for a more pleasing and realistic visual image by taking multiple samples of a scene and blending them together. Enable AA to improve image quality. Disable AA to improve 3D performance

Aniso is for Anistropic (sp?) filtering

I am not sure excatly what it does, but I think works along the lines of AA to help smooth the picture

Both will produce a performance hit. Aniso a minor one and AA a big one.

AA smooths the jaggies (jagged edges that are artifacts of rendering a straight edge at an angle). Some poeple are willing to live with the performance hit and the necessary reduction in resolution in exchange for the loss of the jaggies. Some people (like me) prefer to crank up the resolution and leave AA off.

You really don't appreciate AA in action or FPS games, except that the reduction in jaggies also reduces the crawling pixels artifact that's a byproduct of it (the crawlies can be mistaken for enemy movement in a first person shooter).

I personally leave both AA and Aniso disabled. I play online FPS games and prefer max performance to a visual improvment that's hardly noticeable (to me) while I'm busy running and shooting.

Don't bother experimenting with AA unless you have a high-end video card.

You usually enable these in the card's Advanced Display properties.