SSAA vs MSAA

[Batguerra]

My pc can pretty much run anything and by anything I mean Crysis 3 on very high at full hd resol. with 8x msaa enabled at 90+fps, I just want to know the difference between them and the cost of graphical quality, don't mind on explaining which one gives better performance.

[AlenL]

SSAA is basically running at a higher resolution than the screen and then resampling down to screen resolution. It is the most brute-force of all anti-aliasing approaches, and is not recommended in most cases. Only if you want to show off how overpowered your GPU is.
MSAA does the same effective results but using a special hardware feature that makes sure that only things on edges are rendered at a higher resolution. It is much faster, but still looks practically the same.

In general - stay away from SSAA unless you are benchmarking the upper limits of the GPU. For good visuals, MSAA is enough.

[Batguerra]

Originally posted by AlenL:

SSAA is basically running at a higher resolution than the screen and then resampling down to screen resolution. It is the most brute-force of all anti-aliasing approaches, and is not recommended in most cases. Only if you want to show off how overpowered your GPU is.
MSAA does the same effective results but using a special hardware feature that makes sure that only things on edges are rendered at a higher resolution. It is much faster, but still looks practically the same.

In general - stay away from SSAA unless you are benchmarking the upper limits of the GPU. For good visuals, MSAA is enough.

Thanks a lot, it is getting about 75-90 fps with ssaa at 8x.

[TMAC Blade]

Originally posted by AlenL:

SSAA is basically running at a higher resolution than the screen and then resampling down to screen resolution. It is the most brute-force of all anti-aliasing approaches, and is not recommended in most cases. Only if you want to show off how overpowered your GPU is.
MSAA does the same effective results but using a special hardware feature that makes sure that only things on edges are rendered at a higher resolution. It is much faster, but still looks practically the same.

In general - stay away from SSAA unless you are benchmarking the upper limits of the GPU. For good visuals, MSAA is enough.

does serious sam 3 have ssaa on by default when you hit autodetect or does the game autodetect the msaa.

[DEN [CT]]

MSAA. No SSAA by default, in any perf setup. Like Alen said - SSAA is overkill.