AA and AF

[xenophage]

Could any one explain what they are and what the do in a game? Cos Iv read stuff on the net and it goes above my head?

[REBEL_AU]

ill try to find something that explains it. because if i try to there will be something wrong.
**EDIT**
Basicly AA is:
removal of jagged edges in digital images by averaging adjoining pixels to create a smooth blend of colour.
so it sort of blurs parts of the image.

[Yian]

Yes, AA means Anti-Aliasing. Because your monitor are made of very tiny dots of pixels, when there is a line that is not 0 degree or 90 degree, you will see your supposedly "straight" line looking pixelated. It is because the background and the polygon form contrast, and the pixels stand out, looking ugly.

What AA does is it smooth this effect by bluring the pixels around the polygon a little, so it blends into the rest of the picture. When you see 2X, that means 2 pixels are blurred. 4X means 4 pixels are blurred... 8X and 16 X so on...

AF means Anisotropic Filtering. What it does is making the texture rendering range larger, so when you look at the game world in distance, it is consistant, instead of the world near you are properly rendered, but the world further away from you looks weird. Theoratically, it is normal that the places far from you look blurry, but in games, there is usually a weird line between the rendered scene and the blurry part, and you will notice things keep being rendered along the way as you move around. It really look weird.

AA and AF all have heavy impact on the game performence. AA, in most case, slow down the game the most. Some games slow down if you have AF enabled, too, like FarCry.

Hopefuly these are the answers you are looking for. :)

[xenophage]

Whoa!! Yian dude... that was fucking insightful man :D

[Phobo]

This thread rule!

[Bigolli]

Nice Yian! I always knew what they did, but I could never explain it to friends that wanted to know, so from now on I'm going to have to plagiarise that!
:D