The Impact of Anti-Aliasing on Graphics Performance
When it comes to graphics cards and anti-aliasing, there are several types of anti-aliasing techniques that can significantly impact performance. One type of anti-aliasing is super sampling, also known as SSAA, which applies anti-aliasing effects to the entire screen, providing a smoother image with fewer jagged edges.
Another type of anti-aliasing is FXAA, which only applies anti-aliasing effects to specific areas or edges of rendered images. This can result in a smoother image, but may still leave some jagged edges that are not affected by anti-aliasing. Recently, there has been the introduction of SMAA, which provides improved performance and results compared to SSAA.
In this video, we'll be looking at two benchmarks: the original Tomb Raider benchmark using SSAA and FXAA, and the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark using SMAA. By comparing these two benchmarks, we can see how much of a performance hit is required when increasing the level of anti-aliasing.
The results from these benchmarks are striking. The increase in anti-aliasing settings results in a significant decrease in frame rates, with even small increases in setting levels resulting in substantial drops in FPS. This highlights the fact that anti-aliasing can have a major impact on graphics performance, and that there is always a trade-off between image quality and frame rates.
The choice of GPU also plays a role in this trade-off. The Fury Nano, with its fast HBM memory and 4GB of VRAM, provides an ideal platform for testing the impact of anti-aliasing on performance. This GPU is more relatable to mid-range GPUs found in many gaming systems, making it an excellent choice for testing and comparison.
When it comes to choosing the right level of anti-aliasing, there are many factors to consider. Some gamers may be willing to sacrifice a small amount of frame rate for improved image quality, while others may prioritize performance over aesthetics. However, most gamers will need to find a balance between these two competing priorities.
The key takeaway is that there is always going to be some level of trade-off when it comes to anti-aliasing and graphics performance. A prettier image can result in significant losses in frame rates, as well as increased power consumption and noise from the fans. By understanding this relationship and making informed choices about anti-aliasing settings, gamers can find a balance that suits their needs.
For those interested in experimenting with different anti-aliasing techniques, there is an opportunity to run these same tests on their own systems. We invite readers to test out different settings on their own GPUs and share the results in the comments section of this article. This collective effort will provide valuable insights into how much impact anti-aliasing has on performance across a range of hardware configurations.
As always, we appreciate feedback from our readers and would love to hear about your experiences with graphics performance and anti-aliasing. What do you want to see more of in the channel? New features or new types of tests? Let us know!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys J2 sens here coming at you with another video about graphics cards they're the single most important component when it comes to your gaming experience they're the hottest thing in your system they are the most expensive thing in your system but now we're going to talk about a different type of cost we're going to talk about the cost to FPS and anti-aliasing and exactly how much performance do you really lose by cranking up those settings with its dual bios 10 plus2 powerphase delivery RGB ACX 3.0 cooler and Factory overclock the EVGA GTX 1070 and 1080 for the win are excellent choices for gamers who demand the best learn more by following the link down below now on a high level here cuz I don't want to spend too much time making this video 45 minutes long or an AKA a barnacle video love you Jerry but anti-aliasing is nothing more than a processing method in real time that makes your images look a lot less jaggy as your gaming but unfortunately because it's a process that takes place in real time depending on the type of AA you use and the level of AA you use can have a huge impact on your gaming now all anti-aliasing really does is fake resolution if you will if that makes sense because your screen is made up of a ton of square pixels and the higher the resolution the more Square pixels you have but the problem is the lower the resolution the more significant and severe the jaggies are going to appear 720p gaming 1080p gaming and even 1440p gaming can still have quite a bit of jaggies so that's where anti-aliasing comes in it sort of fakes the softness of those edges and processes the image in real time to make it look more rounded and smooth therefore less jarring of a gaming experience when you're just looking at all of these different squares trying to make something look round over the years though there have been tons of different types of anti-aliasing so we're going to talk about three today we're going to talk about because it's a pretty wide spectrum of impact and there's some proprietary anti-aliasing and there's some open source anti-aliasing so we're really just going to talk about three different types today that kind of occupy a pretty wide spectrum here the first type being well of course no AA so that's our Baseline how much of a performance here are we going to take if we have none turned on whatsoever but we're also going to take a look at ssaa which is a super sampling anti-aliasing it's an older technology and it's got a little bit more of a performance hit we're also going to look at fsaa which is a fast approximation anti-aliasing and then we're also going to take a look at SM ma AA which is a much newer type found uh that has a lot less performance hit and actually applies it to the entire screen some anti-aliasing types only apply it to the edges or the extreme edges of a particular rendered item on the screen which could make the edges look smooth but things happening inside of that particular polygon rendered image would look jaggy still so the two benchmarks we are going to use in this video because of their age difference and the different types of anti-aliasing available in there is the original Tomb Raider benchmark and we're going to take a look at the rise of the Tomb Raider Benchmark now the Tomb Raider Benchmark uses ssaa or super sampling and FXAA and then the rise of the Tomb Raider uses SMA so we'll want to see how much of a performance hit we really get as we step up those particular settings so without further Ado let's look at the results obviously from those benchmarks it is very taxing on your graphics card to start bumping up the anti-aliasing settings remember it's got to go through and process all of those images in real time so the more time it has to spend processing the less time it can send that image to your graphics or your monitor so that's why you see such a huge hit to Performance now I think some of you might have been scratching your head on why he used a fury Nano a couple reasons actually one I wanted the fast hbm on there I wanted to see the like real tangible benefits in dx12 uh on the rise of the Tomb Raider Benchmark and two it's got 4 GB with vram which I think is much more relatable to a lot of the viewers especially with those on lesser end gpus uh without running you know 6 8 12 gigabytes or massive amounts of vram so I thought that this was a pretty good representation of what would be kind of midline on the level of gpus that are out there so that we could test the true impact on the FPS when the core is having to handle all of that additional load without the vram being able to store nearly as much images in there when it comes to you know having a huge buffer of vram so in conclusion if you guys are playing your favorite AAA titles and you're just not getting the level of performance that you think you should be consider lowering the levels of anti-aliasing or even the type of anti-aliasing if it's definitely a trade-off with how jaggies you're willing to put up with versus the level of performance hit you're willing to take there's always going to be a trade-off you can make a prettier image but it's going to come at the cost of FPS thermals and likely noise as your fans have to really ramp up to handle all of that extra load being put on your GPU the GPU load it grows exponentially with the levels of anti-aliasing it is just asking a lot of your graphics card so there you go guys a quick video here showing you some of the impacts obviously there are tons of titles out there with tons of different types of anti-aliasing and the results are definitely going to vary so this is where you guys come in you can run these same tests on your games if you've got a game with a built-in Benchmark run it with different settings on the anti-aliasing and then put your results down in the comments it I could try and do that myself but there are so many of you out there it would be a huge pool of data if you guys are willing to run those tests so if you decide to do it down in the comments list the title The Resolution the type of AA and the level of AA the two 2x 4X whatever and then put your respective FPS on there but keep all of the settings identical and only change the AA settings and I think together we could really get a good idea of how much impact there really is if all of you guys kind of play along and participate as always guys thanks for watching today's video it is so much fun being able to play around with all this different stuff and share information with you so that's why I need you guys to tell me what do you want me to do when it comes to some of these different tests and reviews and project types let me know what you guys want to see on the channel moving forward also so welcome back to school guys get your homework done before watching my videos but make sure you watch them on your recess break or lunch break or whatever I know you guys all bring your phones to school it's no excuse that you shouldn't be watching Jay's 2 cents during school time that's called multitasking or as I like to call multitasking a AA or mtaa Watch J's video while doing homework in class all right guys as always see you in the next videowhat's up guys J2 sens here coming at you with another video about graphics cards they're the single most important component when it comes to your gaming experience they're the hottest thing in your system they are the most expensive thing in your system but now we're going to talk about a different type of cost we're going to talk about the cost to FPS and anti-aliasing and exactly how much performance do you really lose by cranking up those settings with its dual bios 10 plus2 powerphase delivery RGB ACX 3.0 cooler and Factory overclock the EVGA GTX 1070 and 1080 for the win are excellent choices for gamers who demand the best learn more by following the link down below now on a high level here cuz I don't want to spend too much time making this video 45 minutes long or an AKA a barnacle video love you Jerry but anti-aliasing is nothing more than a processing method in real time that makes your images look a lot less jaggy as your gaming but unfortunately because it's a process that takes place in real time depending on the type of AA you use and the level of AA you use can have a huge impact on your gaming now all anti-aliasing really does is fake resolution if you will if that makes sense because your screen is made up of a ton of square pixels and the higher the resolution the more Square pixels you have but the problem is the lower the resolution the more significant and severe the jaggies are going to appear 720p gaming 1080p gaming and even 1440p gaming can still have quite a bit of jaggies so that's where anti-aliasing comes in it sort of fakes the softness of those edges and processes the image in real time to make it look more rounded and smooth therefore less jarring of a gaming experience when you're just looking at all of these different squares trying to make something look round over the years though there have been tons of different types of anti-aliasing so we're going to talk about three today we're going to talk about because it's a pretty wide spectrum of impact and there's some proprietary anti-aliasing and there's some open source anti-aliasing so we're really just going to talk about three different types today that kind of occupy a pretty wide spectrum here the first type being well of course no AA so that's our Baseline how much of a performance here are we going to take if we have none turned on whatsoever but we're also going to take a look at ssaa which is a super sampling anti-aliasing it's an older technology and it's got a little bit more of a performance hit we're also going to look at fsaa which is a fast approximation anti-aliasing and then we're also going to take a look at SM ma AA which is a much newer type found uh that has a lot less performance hit and actually applies it to the entire screen some anti-aliasing types only apply it to the edges or the extreme edges of a particular rendered item on the screen which could make the edges look smooth but things happening inside of that particular polygon rendered image would look jaggy still so the two benchmarks we are going to use in this video because of their age difference and the different types of anti-aliasing available in there is the original Tomb Raider benchmark and we're going to take a look at the rise of the Tomb Raider Benchmark now the Tomb Raider Benchmark uses ssaa or super sampling and FXAA and then the rise of the Tomb Raider uses SMA so we'll want to see how much of a performance hit we really get as we step up those particular settings so without further Ado let's look at the results obviously from those benchmarks it is very taxing on your graphics card to start bumping up the anti-aliasing settings remember it's got to go through and process all of those images in real time so the more time it has to spend processing the less time it can send that image to your graphics or your monitor so that's why you see such a huge hit to Performance now I think some of you might have been scratching your head on why he used a fury Nano a couple reasons actually one I wanted the fast hbm on there I wanted to see the like real tangible benefits in dx12 uh on the rise of the Tomb Raider Benchmark and two it's got 4 GB with vram which I think is much more relatable to a lot of the viewers especially with those on lesser end gpus uh without running you know 6 8 12 gigabytes or massive amounts of vram so I thought that this was a pretty good representation of what would be kind of midline on the level of gpus that are out there so that we could test the true impact on the FPS when the core is having to handle all of that additional load without the vram being able to store nearly as much images in there when it comes to you know having a huge buffer of vram so in conclusion if you guys are playing your favorite AAA titles and you're just not getting the level of performance that you think you should be consider lowering the levels of anti-aliasing or even the type of anti-aliasing if it's definitely a trade-off with how jaggies you're willing to put up with versus the level of performance hit you're willing to take there's always going to be a trade-off you can make a prettier image but it's going to come at the cost of FPS thermals and likely noise as your fans have to really ramp up to handle all of that extra load being put on your GPU the GPU load it grows exponentially with the levels of anti-aliasing it is just asking a lot of your graphics card so there you go guys a quick video here showing you some of the impacts obviously there are tons of titles out there with tons of different types of anti-aliasing and the results are definitely going to vary so this is where you guys come in you can run these same tests on your games if you've got a game with a built-in Benchmark run it with different settings on the anti-aliasing and then put your results down in the comments it I could try and do that myself but there are so many of you out there it would be a huge pool of data if you guys are willing to run those tests so if you decide to do it down in the comments list the title The Resolution the type of AA and the level of AA the two 2x 4X whatever and then put your respective FPS on there but keep all of the settings identical and only change the AA settings and I think together we could really get a good idea of how much impact there really is if all of you guys kind of play along and participate as always guys thanks for watching today's video it is so much fun being able to play around with all this different stuff and share information with you so that's why I need you guys to tell me what do you want me to do when it comes to some of these different tests and reviews and project types let me know what you guys want to see on the channel moving forward also so welcome back to school guys get your homework done before watching my videos but make sure you watch them on your recess break or lunch break or whatever I know you guys all bring your phones to school it's no excuse that you shouldn't be watching Jay's 2 cents during school time that's called multitasking or as I like to call multitasking a AA or mtaa Watch J's video while doing homework in class all right guys as always see you in the next video\n"