what does 4x anti aiasing do?

[skgbafa]

and 2x

[ilya]

Just makes the edges look softer and less jagged but takes up a lot of resources.

 

Only do it, if you got some performance to spare.

 

 

 

Oh and X2 - X4 means how much smoother it makes it (aka how many more resources it takes)

[P4duke]

Makes graphics smoother

 

If you have over 64 MB Video, i recommend 2x.

 

over 128 MB Video - 4x

[AlexDT]

It softens edges by adding blending pixels, like so:

 

[Bashful]

just makes the graphics better.. dont think it'll really affect much, unless you're playing on some 40+" screen. and yes, it drains alot of power, its as good as drawing the entire screen 4x instead.

[compfreak847]

just makes the graphics better.. dont think it'll really affect much, unless you're playing on some 40+" screen. and yes, it drains alot of power, its as good as drawing the entire screen 4x instead.

 

Wrong, the higher your DPI the less you need anti aliasing. It has nothing to do with screen size. It takes nowhere close to 4x the power to do 4x anti-aliasing, my FPS drops 15-20% with it on. It blends in edges by adding transition pixels, like so:

 

 

(Zoom in if you can't see the difference)

[Randox]

Anti-aliasing makes a huge difference.I normally play on my laptop (I normally use my laptop for everything since its more powerful than mu PC), which is native resolution 1280x800 (wide screen). If you want to see the effect, you can (a) stand 20 feet away from your computer and see how smooth everything looks (because distance causes blending for technical biological reasons that have to do with 1 micrometre minimum distance separtion for visual separation) or (B) squint, which achives much teh same blending effect (but also makes things blury). Or just turn anti-aliasing on.

 

 

 

My laptop does a usual laptop trick of using lower memory devices (such as graphics cards) and giving them system recorces to compensate (ie my RAM), right now my graphics card has 880 MB of memory, and I know for a fact that the card has less than 350 MB built in (the laptop is designed to play and steam 1080p movies onto its screen or 60-70 inch HD TV's, so loads of memory is good for buffering). Long story short, RuneScape looks hideous on my laptop without anti-aliasing (AA). 2x is like a slap in teh face because its slows the comp down but dosen't improve it a whole lot (it fixes certain problems that don't normally come up in runescape and makes things a bit smoother), so I use 4x. I only turn the AA off when I dual screen (my PC monitor is ?x1200 I think) because I get 10-15 frames/sec if I leave it on.

 

 

 

Anti-aliasign primarily adds transition pixels. It is no more noticable on lower resolutions than higher for the purposes of runescape because the pixel sizes are the same for all resolution settings. This means higher resolutions just see more area. Now, if you have high resolution on a small screen (generaly by going higher than native resolution if possible), anti-alising makes less difference for reasons I don't care to explain. Higher resolutions will cause anti-alising to have a higher impact on performance because the GPU has to work harder. Of all the graphics options, I belive anti-aliasing is teh most demanding on average, though water might be worse if you standing right next to compious amounts of it.