7800GS 8xS AA ?

[Xxspd88xX]

i was just going through my video card options in nvidia settings, and i came across the options in performacne and quality settings. under the global driver settings, theres options to force AA and AF and all other options. one of the options i saw was 8xS AA under antialiasing.

what exactly is 8xS AA and do any games support it ?

also, is forcing AA and AF be bad for the card ? would it cause games to run worse since it's not application-controlled ?

thanx for the info.

 

[Matthias99]

As you might have found by searching for more than two seconds, "8xS" AA is 4xMSAA combined with 2xSSAA. It will *kill* performance on any but relatively old games. You can force it in the drivers for any game.

also, is forcing AA and AF be bad for the card ?

No. Think about that one for a second.

would it cause games to run worse since it's not application-controlled ?

Questionable. Some games get better AF quality if you enable it through the application, or may have graphical problems if you force AA (due to things like HUD text being 'antialiased' by mistake; this was a problem with Battlefield 1942, for instance). Most of the time it makes little or no difference.

 

[MDesigner]

Hmm.. I turned on 8xS AA on my 7900GT, and Oblivion runs great.. at max settings. One odd thing.. I tried to turn on AA within Oblivion, it said HDR and AA cannot be used at the same time. I wonder if my running 8xS and HDR at the same time is causing some kind of prob in the game. It looks OK so far.. smooth as hell.

 

[Cheesetogo]

You can't run AA and HDR at the same time in oblivion with nvidia cards, and only with a special driver patch for ati cards. What resoulution are you at?

I really liked 8xS AA because it got rid of shimmering in WoW, and I was able to do it without much of a perfromance hit.

 

[hemmy]

8xS isn't as huge a performance hit as it used to be, and NVIDIA cards cannot do MSAA +HDR, but they can do SSAA +HDR which does cause a bigger performance hit