That's going to be a nice XP build 😁

I believe that there were some image quality concerns with GF 6 and 7 type cards maybe, but after that both camps did great AA and AF.

In the driver, there is a setting related to quality. I usually force AF to 16x and set that quality setting to very high.

AMD got their act together pretty good from the Radeon 4k series on so there are no concerns there, as for Nvidia they have been rock solid through out the ages with some horrendous exceptions but both those cards are going to be clean as it gets image wise.

I like AMD's official SSAA support on 5000 and later cards. You can't beat SSAA for image quality. It's only for D3D though and like MSAA it can't always be forced with every game.

GTX 580 is better at AF quality and also support some nice AA modes which are at least as good as ATIs (if not better). The question is whether you can afford it performance wise. High quality AF 16x should be no problem for any old game. Antialiasing could be tricky. Basic MSAA up to 8x (8xQ) should be fine. Then there is transparency AA (Supersampling)... which isn't very fast on Fermi GPUs because they are kinda short on TMUs count.
The absolute king is Sparse Grid Supersampling 😈 It is hidden in regular control panel so you need Nvidia inspector to activate it. Although it is located in tranparency AA section, it does perform full-screen supersampling.

The absolute best you can have is 16x HQAF + 8xQ MSAA + 8x SGSSAA. No ATi/AMD GPU can match it. But beware - performance requirements are extreme, seriously. 🤣

Here are few HL2 screenshots to compare:
16x HQAF + 8x MSAA -> https://abload.de/img/hl2_2017_01_23_21_49_hgzxq.png
16x HQAF + 8x MSAA + 8x SSTRAA -> https://abload.de/img/hl2_2017_01_23_21_48_chb9x.png
16x HQAF + 8x MSAA + 8x SGSSAA https://abload.de/img/hl2_2017_01_23_21_47_y3zxf.png

Al these screenshots were taken using GTX 1070, but all GeForce 8 and later are capable of exactly same image quality. In this case SGSSAA make no visible difference, but in other games you will notice it instantly - for example in GTA 3 it is a must have, otherwise texture shimmering on pathways is very disturbing.

That is indeed very beautiful. Can't really tell too much of a difference between SSTRAA and SGSSAA though 😜.

Yeah, here are screenshots from GTA 3, it should be easier to spot the difference there. Unfortunately it is impossible to do pixel-pixel accurate screenshots in GTA...

16x HQAF + 8xMSAA

16x HQAF + 8x MSAA + 8x SSTRAA

16x HQAF + 8x MSAA + 8x SGSSAA

Transparency AA makes almost no difference here (GTA is not using transparent textures?) but SGSSAA really shines in GTA. Shimmering and jaggies are much easier to notice when moving, unfortunately it is not so simple to get video with bitrate and quality high enough to see it. Anyway even these screenshots show the difference.

1. railroad above the street
2. sidewalk at the left
3. window shutters and those ledges also on the left side

All these areas are much smoother when using supersampling. 😀

It does help tremendously here and you are right that seeing it in action would really help. I have grown to really despise texture shimmering in the last few years. 🤣

I've had blurring problems with forced SGSSAA in some games. That's why I usually don't bring it up. It's also obviously a bit involved to use it, needing 3rd party utilities. AMD's SSAA is some kind of rotated grid SSAA and looks just as good anyway. On some cards you can also mess with EQAA (aka CSAA) and edge detect filtering with it. I typically just use 4x SSAA.

Forcing anisotropic filtering can cause weird issues. Sometimes a game uses textures for things other than just what you think of as a texture. For example in Oblivion it messes up the look of the low resolution 2D trees. It makes them look pixelated. Sometimes games use lookup tables stored as a texture for some effects. Not something to force AF on.

Blurring? Well - every kind of antialiasing induces some amount of blur, otherwise it wouldn't eliminate jaggies and shimmering. But I don't see a reason why SGSSAA would be more blurred than any other supersampling. MSAA + TRAA should be more sharp, as it doesn't affect all textures... but of course isn't as effective.

For me forced AF is the first thing to do after clean OS + drivers install 😀 Yes, in some games it can be problematic but how many is that... maybe 1 out of 50? In that case it is simple to set this particular game profile fo app-controlled and done. For old games forced AF is the only way - usually they lack menu option to enable it.

the AF on Radeon HD5000s is kind of broken, I can notice it in some games without to much effort, I think they fixed it on the HD6000 series.

SPBHM wrote:

the AF on Radeon HD5000s is kind of broken, I can notice it in some games without to much effort, I think they fixed it on the HD6000 series.

Might want to try adjusting Catalyst AI settings. It might be the brilinear filtering optimization thing. GeForce <8 has this sort of problem too.

havli wrote:

Blurring? Well - every kind of antialiasing induces some amount of blur, otherwise it wouldn't eliminate jaggies and shimmering. But I don't see a reason why SGSSAA would be more blurred than any other supersampling. MSAA + TRAA should be more sharp, as it doesn't affect all textures... but of course isn't as effective.

No in some games it was exceptionally blurry. I'm not positive but I think Mass Effect was one game. You're right though that when SGSSAA works it looks great. I usually use NVidia DSR these days though because it works with everything. It's the official version of the old custom resolution downsampling trick. 😀