Anti Aliasing worth it?

[mesaywee]

Hey, I'm trying to figure out what is the most economic way of making my game look its best.

(Battlefield 3 btw)

My graphics settings are:

Texture Quality: Ultra
Shadow: Ultra
Effect: Ultra
Mesh: Ultra
Terrain: Ultra
Terrain Decoration:Ultra
Anti Aliasing deferred: off
Anti Aliasing Post: off
Motion Blur: on
Anisotropic Filter: 16x
Ambient Occulsion: SSAO

Right now my system runs these setting between 39-47 FPS, however sometimes dipping to 35 FPS in the most demanding situations, and peaking at 50 FPS.
I am aiming for a 40 FPS as that is what the human eye can see, im not one of those guys that swears by 80 fps.

So what I'm asking is... Should I turn some of the Ultra's to highs in order to turn on some of the Anti-Aliasing? If so which ones? And is it worth it to turn down the Anisotropic filter to gain FPS? Does Anti-Aliasing add a lot to the image quality?

[SebC]

I pretty much always turn off motion blur. It's designed to produce an effect similar to a smooth framerate, but if you can get your framerate up to adequate levels by turning it off... well to me that's better.

[FanIn80]

I might be on crack, but doesn't the use of anisotropic filtering alleviate the need for antialiasing?

[photon]

Two different things, anisotropic filtering is filtering of the texture surfaces viewed at oblique angles when further away from the viewer to make them look good. Anti-aliasing removes the jaggies of the edge of a polygon or other thing to make things look smoother.

[GoinAllTheWay]

I think it worth it for sure. The times I notice the jagged edges this most in game like BF3 is when the wind is blowing bushes or trees off in the distance, somtimes you get that flat line running back and forth across the top of them which makes me think it's someone moving. AA really helps with that affect IMO.

[Henry Fool]

I always use at least 4x anti-aliasing.

Does the anisotrophic filtering need to be 16x and how much does that affect performance? Outside the textures, some of those Ultras might have poor cost-benefit ratios, depending on how the game is designed.

There are usually comparisons on the web, like this video: