Antialiasing is really a fudge to make low resolution pictures look better so, (depending on how big your screen is, how high the resolution and how close you are to it) a little AA can go a long way. I'm sure there's a YouTube video with someone trying different levels at HD and demonsting that the highest settings made little appreciable different to the picture while stuffing the FPS.
One thing I recently discovered via the internet is that sometimes the max settings are not the best for AA. I recently dropped them and had much better and stable frame rates compared when I set that all the way to the bottom.
I know what anti aliasing is, but am totally unfamiliar with the settings terminology used in TS. What are FX, MS and SS AA?
MS=multi-sampling SS=super-sampling. I think SS works by rendering a picture at higher resolution than needed then scaling that down with MS being an optimisation of SS that devotes its attention to the edges of the polygons which make up everything being rendered. FSAA or FXAA (again I think) is not strictly AA at all- it finds adjacent pixels that have a high contrast and smooths them out appropriately or not so it can introduce unnecessary blur. But it's fast. Can't emphasise enough how much this is all IIRC. There must be a wiki.
In simple terms, Train Simulator's AA techniques are arranged in order of intensity and quality. The higher up the list, the lower the demands on your computer and poorer overall quality. The lower down the list the higher the demands on your computer and the better the overall quality. However, as JJTimothy expertly outlined: FXAA is Fast approXimate AA (sometimes referred to as Fast Sample AA or FSAA), which is a form of screen-space AA where the entire screen image data alongside luminance data is compared and edge-adjacent pixels are then smoothed and output based on that data. MSAA is Mutlisampling AA, and is a form of Spatial AA where multiple frame edge-adjacent pixels are rendered and compared, then smoothed to provide a smoother edge, often at the same resolution being rendered. SSAA is Supersampling AA, which is also a form of Spatial AA. Unlike MSAA, an image is rendered at a higher resolution and edge-adjacent pixels are then compared and smoothed, and then downsampled to the resolution you're rendering at. The number shown represents how many times larger the image is rendered in both Vertical and Horizontal. For example SSAA 2 x 1 means the image is being rendered at two times greater in vertical than that in horizontal, which can be useful for ultrawide or multimonitor outputs. SSAA 3 x 3 means the image is being rendered at 3 times actual render size in both vertical and horizontal. In terms of performance overhead, the above is listed in order of computational effort required. FXAA is the fastest and cheapest in terms of raw horsepower needed as it is generally a free form of AA (requires virtually no computational overhead) with SSAA being the most computationally intensive. FXAA is often used alongside other AA methods because it brings inherent optimisation improvements in deferred rendering pipelines such as those used in Train Simulator. Best, Steve
Thanks, Steve and JJ. So SS is the best: will try that when I’m back up and running and see what it looks like and how my PC can cope.
