2019-06-01_PC_Gamer

NoAA

MLAA

PERFORMANCE

I used Batman: Arkham City’s benchmarking tool to test a few
older anti-aliasing methods: MSAA, FXAA, and TXAA. The
results show, as expected, that FXAA is the least resource
intensive, while MSAA and TXAA cause a significant drop in
average framerate over no anti-aliasing.
Some more modern games don’t give you much of a
choice. Battlefield 5, for example, offers me two TAA quality
options. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey offers low, medium, high,
and adaptive options.

Batman: Arkham City AA benchmarks

(2xNvidiaGTXTitanSLI)

No AA

MSAA 8x

FXAA (high)

TXAA (high)

Avg.FPS MaxFPS MinFP

161 224 57

84 166 44

154 204 60

98 118 67

S

PC Graphics Options Explained

HARDWARE

Theoretically,in-gamegraphicsoptionsshouldn’tmatter.You
can just open up the Nvidia or AMD control panel and override
their settings. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. While
you can set overrides for any game, I’ve had little success
getting them to work.
“Very often when overrides don’t work it’s due to deferred
rendering,” says Vining, “which just breaks a lot of common
anti-aliasing techniques.” Alex Austin also notes that some of
his techniques don’t work with override settings. So, it’s just a
matter of testing. Turn off all AA in the in-game options, set
the override in your control panel, and hop back in: it should
be apparent whether or not it took effect.
I’ve found that AMD’s MLAA works the most when enabled
in the control panel. It’s important to note, however, that it’s a
post-processing filter and applies to everything in the scene.
That means it can take care of hard edges within textures,
which can be good, but comes with the side-effect that it may
also go after desirable edges, such as in text. Notice how it
slightly smooths the text in the BioShock Infinite menu, and
even goes so far as to smooth my FRAPS FPS overlay.
Supersampling using Nvidia’s DSR or AMD’s Virtual Super
Resolution, however, is more reliable. In the AMD settings, you
simply have to turn Virtual Super Resolution on in the Display
tab. If you have an Nvidia card, head to the ‘Manage 3D
settings’ section of the Nvidia Control Panel, where you can
select DSR factors up to 4x. Do one of those things, and in
your games’ options you should be able to select resolutions
higher than your display resolution. Do so, and the game will
run at the selected resolution and be downsampled to your
display resolution – very taxing, but it looks nice.

It depends on your GPU, your preference, and what kind of

performance you’re after. If framerate is an issue, however, the

choice is usually obvious – FXAA is very efficient. If you’ve got

an RTX card, and the game you’re playing supports it, give

DLSS a try – you paid for it, and it’s top of the line. In older

games, you’ll probably have to do a bit of testing to get the

combination of look and performance you want. If you have the

hardware to do it, you can also try supersampling instead of

using the built-in options, which usually works. Overriding

settings in other ways, however, isn’t a sure thing.

Overriding anti-

aliasing settings

Which AA should I use?

No AA 8xMSAA FXAA