Hello I’ve a stupid question. Does it make any sense to enable both of them? (MSAA x8 and 200% render scale) ? Or do they exactly the same thing? I’ve both of them enabled but I don’t see any difference if I lower 200% scale to 150% . Sorry for my garbage English.
Fundamentally they do the same thing in different ways, but the two can be used in tandem if you really want. As you’ve noticed there’s no appreciable difference in doing so, however, aside from the performance loss.
In very broad terms, there’s no real point in using both. Use one or the other, depending upon preference. MSAA 4x should provide a very similar result to 200% scale but with a far lower performance overhead, but 200% scale will affect the entire image where MSAA only applies to geometry (and some texture edges if Alpha Test is enabled).
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Thank you very much !! It was very helpful. I’m actually playing with MSAA 8x and 150% and I can notice a mega mega little difference if I change from 150 to 200. But J don’t even notice which is better. What’s your suggestion? I don’t wanna loose frames for nothing. I’m playing with i7-10700 and rtx 2070S on full hd with 144hz. It’s hard for me to determine if I lose anything using my 150% render scale and MSAA 8x cause I don’t hit the gpu limit in open world with my 144 hz. But in Raids I do it. It’s hard to determine the exact cost of 100–> 150% render scale. Would you use everything like me ? Thanks and sorry again for the stupid question and suboptimal English.
Your English is fine. There’s also nothing wrong with asking questions if you’re not sure.
Personally I use MSAA 4x with the NVidia Control Panel set to have 4x Transparency Supersampling enabled at 100% scale. But I also only run at 1080p on a 60Hz screen using a GTX1080, so my requirements are a little different.
For your situation, if you can barely notice the difference between 150% and 200% then there’s no real reason to run 200%. Running at 150% instead will reduce the amount of pixels to be rendered by almost half. This won’t always make a difference, but it can - and I would suspect it will in raids where more effects are being drawn.
Likewise I would also test lowering from MSAA 8x to 4x, or perhaps even 2x. The performance overhead of MSAA is nowhere near that of the render scale, but if you can’t notice the visible difference while actually playing then you may as well not be wasting the resources either. If nothing else it may make your graphics card run cooler, which is easier on the fans and uses less power.
Ultimately it is an individual preference. Higher settings (8x, 200%) will always look better but sometimes it simply isn’t enough better to make it worthwhile. In the heat of a boss fight just having MSAA 2x alone could be enough to stop you noticing the “stair step” edges, even if it doesn’t necessarily look as good in a screen shot.
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