Crysis Investigation

Test 4: Anti-Aliasing (XP)

Lastly we’ll compare anti-aliasing performance and image quality. Driver level anti-aliasing doesn’t appear to work with Crysis (even after making a custom nVidia profile to force it) though interestingly transparency anti-aliasing will work, but only intermittently on small parts of the scene. The best course of action then is to use the game’s AA settings.

Note that to enable AA from the game you will need to have the shader quality set to at least high. Using a lower value with AA enabled automatically disables AA. All of these screenshots had all settings set to high. Firstly let’s do an image quality comparison:

XP 0xAA

XP 2xAA

XP 4xAA

The screenshots don’t show much of a difference but rest assured, in-game with actual movement there is a massive difference. The best place to spot a difference is probably on the edges of the wooden box to the right, or the tin roofs of the small buildings running along the beach to the left. You could also try zooming the screenshots a bit to spot the difference a bit better.

We reverted back to the GPU benchmark for these tests and used all settings at high quality.

Dropping to 2xAA from 4xAA results in a small performance improvement while disabling AA completely provides a reasonable difference over 4xAA. Depending on your tastes however, you may prefer to disable other game settings in exchange for AA, but remember you must have shader setting to at least high to use it.