do you use aa or crank up the resolution?

[jpph]

yo i was just playing cod 4 on my new 8600gt ( :D ) and i thought it was maxed out, cos it looked gorgeous however when i went to graphics options it was playing on 600 by 800 for some reason. i was really surprised cos it looked so good, it turned out aa was on X4.
why do people bother with high resolutions when they hardly make a difference if your using aa?
your thoughts?
and which do you prefer to do, res or aa?

[cw695356]

COD4 is 600P native on the consoles so its not really a suprise it was 800x600 by default. Did you try increasing the res too?

[Punkster]

i think that on most games and graphics cards, turning up the resolution is less demanding than using AA.

It's different for some graphics cards, some can use AA with little decrease in frame rate, whereas some don't really support AA and the game ends up really laggy.

I find that with my graphics card, it is better to turn up the resolution to 1024x768 wit no AA than to use 800X600 with AA turned on. Also, most 17" monitors look best with 1024x768 resolution anyway. any lower and it looks pixelated, any higher and you're decreasing the frame rate unnecessarily.

[jpph]

COD4 is 600P native on the consoles so its not really a suprise it was 800x600 by default. Did you try increasing the res too?
i put the res up to 1024 by 768 and kept the aa on, i stil got fine fps.
i dont understand your comment about 600p, does cod 4 run at 600 by 800 on consoles? cos i want to prove to my friend it looks better on pc.

[Punkster]

a standard TV will run it at 600x480 resolution in other words. Only HDTVs are as good as PC monitors atm. so quite clearly COD4 would look better on a PC monitor, but you'd need at least decent hardware to go with the monitor.

[cw695356]

The game was made at 600p and the console upscales it to HD. SD TVs run at 720x576i in PAL and 720x480i in NTSC format, not 600x480.

[Punkster]

oh ok, so it is still less than the standard resolution on a PC monitor.

[cw695356]

The PC version still has a native res that the game is made in and the hardware scales this into what the user wants. It will always look better on the PC so long as you have the power to do it.

[MurdersGalore]

Yeah...most of the time Higher resolution is better then filtering (AA and AF). But I remember on the older cards (namely geforce fx series) AA and AF where utterly useless. It was a great way to kill frame rates while not noticing much improvement.
Performance at high resolutions is more memory bound then GPU bound, so its always best in practice to crank the resolution up first. On most modern cards I have played with, the performance hit from cranking up the resolution has been negligeble. Basically, if you have a card with 256mb ram or more, high resolutions shouldn't hinder performance at all unless you are using extreme resolutions on an expensive monitor.
I always turn up the game options up first...if they dont have a performance hit then I go to my max native resolution for my monitor, and if there is no performance penalty there....I crank up the AA and then the AF. I usually never go higher then 4xAA or AF as I have seen little noticeable improvement. Ofcourse, Mileage may vary.
Some people are happy with no aa and low resolutions to get those ultra high framerates. Some people dont care so much so long as they have nice eye candy. I consider a game playable at anything more then 20fps. Some people find that to be unplayable.

[canveyboy]

i tend to just use high quality setting on my graphic cards.
then theres the game settings graphics to take into account, i play quake4 4 on 1280 x 1024 on ultra high settings and crysis 1280 x 1024 all settings set to very high ive never tinkered around with AA and AF