So as some of you may or may not know, ATI recently released drivers 10.7a, which provides support for forcing antialiasing in StarCraft 2.
I downloaded it and ran 4xAA. The game played fine and certainly looked a bit better (mostly noticeable if zooming in), while the inter-mission parts on the Hyperion were noticeably cleaner looking - for example the TV in the Cantina has noticeable aliasing going on due to it's awkward angle, and it almost completely eliminates that.
However, after a mission I alt tabbed to Afterburner which I left the graph running in the background. The GPU usage was 99% on both my OCed 5850s, and my frame rates were between 25-35 FPS during gameplay! Compared to needing Vsync to cap at 60 so my cards don't go crazy, and then only using maybe 80% usage, that's a huge hit. I guess they'll work on optimizing it for that game but at the time being, I can't see anyone with even "good" midrange cards using AA in SC2.
Obviously it's not a "big deal" but at the same time, it's hard to imaging SC2 putting such a hurting on high end GPUs just by enabling AA.
I tried 8xAA but that just killed it, the game became stuttery. With the framerate I acheived the game is completely playable since it's an RTS, but seriously it's crazy how hard of a hit you take with AA on.
I downloaded it and ran 4xAA. The game played fine and certainly looked a bit better (mostly noticeable if zooming in), while the inter-mission parts on the Hyperion were noticeably cleaner looking - for example the TV in the Cantina has noticeable aliasing going on due to it's awkward angle, and it almost completely eliminates that.
However, after a mission I alt tabbed to Afterburner which I left the graph running in the background. The GPU usage was 99% on both my OCed 5850s, and my frame rates were between 25-35 FPS during gameplay! Compared to needing Vsync to cap at 60 so my cards don't go crazy, and then only using maybe 80% usage, that's a huge hit. I guess they'll work on optimizing it for that game but at the time being, I can't see anyone with even "good" midrange cards using AA in SC2.
Obviously it's not a "big deal" but at the same time, it's hard to imaging SC2 putting such a hurting on high end GPUs just by enabling AA.
I tried 8xAA but that just killed it, the game became stuttery. With the framerate I acheived the game is completely playable since it's an RTS, but seriously it's crazy how hard of a hit you take with AA on.