You know the ones,....the complicated little bast's that no bugger ever explains properly
Well...here goes
Anisotropic filtering:
The ability for a graphic card to make a flat texture "lean away" from you without going warped, jaggy or corrupt. Imagine a flat wall of a texture in front of you, start to lean away from you at the top. From your point of view it would seem that the top becomes narrower (like a trapezoid), but the whole texture needs to be filtered to make it look right.
On a 3d plane, zoooming across your vision,that's made up of hundred of triangles with textures on, the process is mind boggling. But the stronger the AF is the better the shape holds up, the smoother it is, and the more acurate the image is. BUT IT CLOBBERS YOUR FRAME RATE. On the whole nVidia cards are better at it, and this can be seen in Quake 3 and Doom based games, where video card reviewers change the settings of the game engine to show where the textures change appearance at different distances from the viewers point of view. nVidia cards do it much much smoother (on the whole)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering
Anti-Aliasing:
To smooth the jaggies....but how? Well that's the rub. It's not just jaggies that make your cockpit look like its made of lego bricks, its more indepth that that.
BUT that's what we use it for. It is, in essence, a good way to have smooth lines at lower resolutions. The hardware puts off-coloured, squares in the outer edge gaps where the jaggies are. Please no one shout at me for being so damn basic, it's the most basic guide!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_aliasing
ATI cards find this process much easier than nVidia cards of equiv age.
The strength of both of these processes is measured in x2 x4 etc. On some games it is simply best to knock the resolution of the damn game up instead, BUT that takes mammoth memory and lets face it, some games wont go that high, and some monitors wont either!
SO we use both, in conmbination, to make the games look less jagy, but not lose too much frame rate.
I'd suggest activating the frame rate monitor in game (Hat will know how) and then running a track in the game, such as Black Death and seeing where it drops too!
Then re adjust
