What takes more oomph, gpu and cpu, af or aa?

[Blakhart]

Ok that's sorted.
Now does it take any more gpu cycles to do 4xaf as compared to 2xaf? Or is it all done in one pass? Would that lengthen the pass time? This is on a 6800 by the way.

 

[John Reynolds]

SuperSample AA is teh bandwidth eater, causes the biggest performance loss.

Fill rate, because of the additional color values written per sub-sample.

 

[Pete]

Now does it take any more gpu cycles to do 4xaf as compared to 2xaf? Or is it all done in one pass? Would that lengthen the pass time? This is on a 6800 by the way.

Yes, and it'd translate into lower framerates. Realistically, though, I doubt you'd see more than a 10% hit going from 1x ("off") to 16xAF because of the way AF's been optimized on current GPUs (you're not getting your requested amount of AF on all surfaces and angles, so setting it to 16x is more like a max than an average).

 

[Blazkowicz]

I'm running 71.89 drivers and the vsync option is definitely there. on 9x.xx, did you try with the older control pannel (yeah, dumb, obvious question perhaps), or set it with nHancer.
Anyway, maybe the tribes games don't run so "slow" with certain drivers, I don't know.

and btw about af/aa. The other day I ran RTCW, but hadn't set the AA/AF profile for it, so it ran at 1024 no aa no af.. I thought it was running in 640x480. lol, without those things, games look so blurry and pixellated that I feel like I play on a voodoo1 (quality-wise, speed is fine )

back to 2x/4x (I have a geforce 4) it looked good again.