Recently got a really nice system upgrade just in time for the new expansion, and it allows me to mess around with some advanced graphics settings that I didn’t really have access to before. The main one I noticed was quite a few anti-aliasing settings. Who here has those enabled, what difference does it make performance wise, and is it worth turning on?
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I honestly won’t play a game long-term if it doesn’t have decent AA options. On the other hand, there are some people who swear they can’t notice a difference.
It just sharpens images and eliminates the “crawling” effect you get while moving. It’s a night and day difference to me. I always play with 8x multisampling and I’ve had positive results with multisample alpha test as well. Post process AA didn’t feel necessary to me with these two enabled.
Be mindful that the performance cost can be steep. Turn on your framerate display and check it with and without AA to see if you’re comfortable with the drop. I typically don’t fall below 100 FPS with my set-up under load so I’m content.
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The most basic explanation is that anti-aliasing removes the jaggies you see on geometry in the game world, it doesn’t matter if you’re moving or not (unless you’re specifically talking about MSAA vs CMAA; MSAA is generally better in motion).
It’s far more pronounced at lower resolutions than if you’re playing in 4k, for example; I play in 4k and don’t feel the need to use AA generally since the visual benefit isn’t enough to justify the performance difference at that resolution. If you’re playing in 1080p or lower, you’ll definitely want it on. 1440p it’s a bit of a toss up and more user dependent, if you see jaggies that bother you turn it on, if you don’t, turn it off and save some performance for something else.
There are benefits and tradeoffs to the different AA options available in WoW, so you might just need to try each one and see what you like the best. Generally speaking at least, the best looking options are at the bottom of the lists in WoW’s settings and the best performance options at the top.
If you want a decent in-depth rundown of all the settings and what to expect, google “logical increments wow” and check out the guide from the logicalincrements web site. I think their performance chart overestimates what system you need to achieve good results and I don’t recommend using it at all, but the rest is still decent info.
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