Anti-Aliasing help on 24 inch monitor

[rathana_v]

hi im wondering if i need to enable anti-aliasing for my setup....i have a xfx 5850 gpu and a samsung 24inch 1920x1080 res...do i really have to turn aa on, on that high of a resolution or is it fine with it off...i understand that if you play on a smaller monitor/resolution you might need it on...but on bigger monitors with aa on it eats a lot of frames....is there a big visual increase with aa on high resolution monitors or is it just not worth it?

 

[wolfram23]

AA is what smoothes out edges. A game always looks nicer with AA. The more the better. But yes, it's also a GPU hog. IMO you should always aim to use at least 2xMSAA. Some games 8x is doable.
NoAA

With AA

(imgs from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_aliasing)

 

[rathana_v]

yea i see...earlier when benchmarking nba 2k10...i got 80fps with aa all the way up...and with aa off i got about 95fps...and barely even notice a difference in visuals or nothing at all

 

[wolfram23]

Some games do it better than others. In Mass Effect, there's these wierd jelly beings that stand on really long thin legs. Well, by default there's no AA and when I walked up to one, the legs were just a mess until I got close. So I went into CC and turned on 4xMSAA. Back to the game and the legs looked totally fine from a distance. So basically, it is situational. However I should point out that if you're over 60fps then there's really no reason to not use it.

 

[rathana_v]

off question i see in your computer stats how did you get 960core and 1210 memory overclocked i can only get to like 850 and 1150 and i will get a blue screen when i got to like 1175 memory..im using msiafterburner...did you turn up the volts?...and i thought u couldnt run physx with ati and nvidia cards together?

 

[wolfram23]

For the OC, yes, I'm running more voltage. From 1.08V up to 1.18V. For memory, you can't increase memory voltage (well, I've read about a possible way but let's not go there). It's really luck of the draw. 5870s are default iirc 1200 mem and can clock up to 1300. If you're lucky, you get 5850 VRAM that only barely failed being a 5870 and if you're unlucky it'll be much lower. So I did alright being able to get 1200 or 1210 (I just use 1200 now). Some people have had their 5850s up to 1250 even 1300 mem.

As to the PhysX, it's not officially supported but there's a patch to get it to work.

 

[rathana_v]

i cant seem to increase the core voltage in msiafterburner for some reason

 

[wolfram23]

Depends on your card, the non reference ones often get voltage modding disabled. I'm assuming you have already changed the config file to allow unofficial overclocking and also checked the voltage monitoring/modding check boxes in the settings window. The only other option that might work is a BIOS flash.

 

[rathana_v]

i dont have the reference models...and flashing the bios seems confusing to me...i check the voltage monitoring boxes but nothing seems to happen..any ideas

 

[wolfram23]

i dont have the reference models...and flashing the bios seems confusing to me...i check the voltage monitoring boxes but nothing seems to happen..any ideas

Yeah well that just means you're limited to stock voltage then. There's no workarounds as it's a hardware issue. Except as I said, possibly a BIOS flash but I wouldn't recommend that for a beginner.

 

[rathana_v]

Best answer selected by rathana_v.