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Hawk:
Assuming one gets a good framerate at 1600 X 1200 with no anti-aliasing or anistropic filtering...

or the same framerate at 1152 X 864 with AA4X and AF8X, Which should look better?

Is there some rule of thumb for a trade-off between greater resolution vs lower res with AA and AF?

Specifically, I'm wondering about Half-Life2 running on a 20.1" flat panel that has a native resolution of 1600 X 1200. Doom3 is similar, but I didn't notice an AF adjustment, just AA.

Honesty compels me to admit I can't tell the difference so the matter is academic - it would be nice to have the things set to optimum for when the kids (whose eyes are better) visit, though.  :oops:

theCZ:
If you can run HL2 at 1600x1200, then you must have one heck of a computer!  I'm thinking that running it at a smaller resolution with all the extras won't be as nice as huge resolution.  Besides, if you can't tell the difference, just run it at whatever gets you the best framerate.

cfabe:
On an LCD, do whatever you can to run at native resolution. Looks like crap if you don't, very blurry.

Control Group:
Yep, there's a rule of thumb: higher resolution is always better than AA. It's preferable to actually have more information than to sort of fake having more information. (I'm sure there's a cutoff such that the increase in resolution doesn't outweigh the apparent increase provided by AA, but that step is smaller than is supported by any game I've ever seen).

So, for the ideal game experience, you up your resolution as far as you can while maintaining a decent framerate. Bearing in mind that framerate is monitor-limited, too, which is something the gaming rags won't tell you. If your monitor is refreshing at 30 Hz (not uncommon for flat-panel monitors), any framerate over 30fps isn't being shown. The only advantage to a framerate higher than your monitor's refresh rate is that when it bottoms out due to in-game activity, its low point is still at least as high as your monitor's refresh rate.

(This is why the tests they run where machine A gets 178fps on Uber Game X, while machine B gets 193fps are so meaningless. If your monitor can only show you 60 different images a second, what use are the extra 118 images, much less the extra 133?)

ALL THAT BEING SAID: the "correct" settings for a game are those which look best to the user. If the person behind the keyboard finds 640x480 with 4xFSAA more aesthetically pleasing than 2048x1536 with no AA, then that's how he should play it.

Sean Smith:

--- Quote ---Assuming one gets a good framerate at 1600 X 1200 with no anti-aliasing or anistropic filtering...

or the same framerate at 1152 X 864 with AA4X and AF8X, Which should look better?

Is there some rule of thumb for a trade-off between greater resolution vs lower res with AA and AF?

Specifically, I'm wondering about Half-Life2 running on a 20.1" flat panel that has a native resolution of 1600 X 1200. Doom3 is similar, but I didn't notice an AF adjustment, just AA.

Honesty compels me to admit I can't tell the difference so the matter is academic - it would be nice to have the things set to optimum for when the kids (whose eyes are better) visit, though.  :oops:

With LCDs, always run at the native resolution if you can.  Image quality degrades radically when it tries to interpolate non-native resolutions.

Anisotropic Filtering (AF) has a small performance hit, and improves texture quality for objects rendered at a distance or at a funny angle to the point of view.  Modern graphics cards can typically go up to at least 4xAF with little or no performance hit, and the visual difference is nice.

Doom 3 automatically enables 8xAF at High or Ultra quality, otherwise it is set to 0xAF.  You can force AF in the console if you want to.  "seta_ImageAnistropy" followed by the number is the command IIRC.

Anti-Aliasing (AA) is smoothing of jagged edges.  Performance hit is much bigger than AF, but modern graphics cards can handle it at 2x at high resolutions and 4x at lower resolutions.  Overall, more resolution is better, but if your eye is really annoyed by jagged edges, drop the resolution and increase the AA level.

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