What is AA and FPS

AA stands for anti-aliasing and FPS stands for frames per second.

go here for more info about AA

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/examples_image_s...

as for FPS (Frame per second) its also indicates how your game running either smooth or lagging use FRAPS its popular game recorder has FPS features (colored yellow) which every gamer use it for determining FPS an 30+FPS is very smooth to human eyes also the perfect FPS level lower FPS to 30 is kind a bad but try FRAPS use it to your game but dont record it just look at the numeric number colored yellow so you well relate how FPS works

I downloaded the FRAPS and the yellow number on the corner jumps between 30 to 40 while running around in COD 4. Is that good or bad? Is it the higher the number the better or the other way around?

fps= higher is better.

Some are happy with 30~40fps as it is usually fluid enough. Some fps gamers though require a minimum of 60 or 100fps as they like to see everything when things go to hell (explosions and all).

FPS = Frames Per Second, or how many frames (images) per second the GPU can create.

As a general rule, a LCD can show up to 60 Frames every second, so thats the baseline requirement FPS is measured against. The closer the FPS count is to 60, the smoother the gameplay is. The lower the number, the fewer frames are shown, and the more jerky the game appears.

As a general rule, having FPS that remains stable is prefered over FPS that jumps. IE: If FPS is stable at around 30 or so, games are quite playable. But if FPS jumps from a high of 45 to a low of 15, then parts of the game may be unplayable, even if the average is higher then 30 FPS or so.

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AA = Anti Alising, which is a method a reducing how jagged an image looks. A moniter is basically made up of individual pixels (think of them as squares, for simplicities sake). As such, you can't make a perfectly stright line except when going exactly horizontal/vertical, so all images look somewhat jagged around the edges. AA basically uses extra CPU power to try and make individual images less jagged.

Heres a decent example:


The second daimond used anti-alising to smooth the edges out.