Pixel fillrate's relevant mostly from a historical standpoint and is not directly related to AA/AF performance any more than it's related to other features. Texel fillrate's what you're looking for, but without a sufficient amount of memory bandwidth to go with it, it has little meaning.

Pixel Fillrate (ROP unit thing) is helpful only IF U have memory bandwidth to back it up, it's nessessary for high resolutions. SSAA will take advantage of higher Pixel Fillrate.
Texel Fillrate (TMU unit thing), will enable GPU to "paint" 3D objects faster, or in case of AF, do it more accuratly over longer depth (distance).

As for whats more important :
AF is A LOT MORE visible than SSAA IF U have high enough resolution (at least to me).
High AF is also (usually) cheaper to do than High AA (performance impact is lower with AF).

As to Old gen vs. New gen :
U should know that RAW numbers can be misleading, because or example better compresion of colors, can make a difference and reduce the impact of smaller bus width, or lower Pixel Fillrate number between two graphics cards.

Ah, so in the case of AA, it's pixel (instead of texel) fill rate and memory bandwidth that are most important, aren't they? While texel fill rate is more important for things like AF.

In case of fill rate numbers between generations, to what extent do they matter (or doesn't matter)? I mean, modern games would likely be faster on GTX 480 than on GTX 280, despite the former's smaller fill rate and memory bandwidth, because the latter has better shader processor and the likes. But we're talking about FSAA on old games; games like Freedom Force and Warcraft III which only benefit from greater fill rate instead of better shader model.

As a side remark:

On modern high-resolution monitors, AA in all its shapes and forms is, generally, a little more than completely useless.

"A little more than completely" because the negligible improvements in visuals it brings are more than offset by the performance penalty it entails. 😀

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Ah, so in the case of AA, it's pixel (instead of texel) fill rate and memory bandwidth that are most important, aren't they? While texel fill rate is more important for things like AF.

In case of fill rate numbers between generations, to what extent do they matter (or doesn't matter)? I mean, modern games would likely be faster on GTX 480 than on GTX 280, despite the former's smaller fill rate and memory bandwidth, because the latter has better shader processor and the likes. But we're talking about FSAA on old games; games like Freedom Force and Warcraft III which only benefit from greater fill rate instead of better shader model.

Yes.
Guessing what's more important between GPU gen's is hard, since old games that do not use any Shaders (ie. DirectX 7 only) or use old versions (like PS1.4/2.0), will benefit most from RAW Fillrates (since shader performance isn't an issue with a GTX 285 or higher class cards).

But how much ?
I really don't know.
Never run a Quake III Arena type game on GTX 285 and GTX 580 (with a CPU, that won't bottleneck them in it).

dr_st wrote:

As a side remark:

On modern high-resolution monitors, AA in all its shapes and forms is, generally, a little more than completely useless.

"A little more than completely" because the negligible improvements in visuals it brings are more than offset by the performance penalty it entails. 😀

While I don't have a 4k screen, they have been saying this since games started using 640 x 480 and resolutions increased 😀

I'll take SSAA over more pixels any time. Hopefully the next round of 14 nm cards will give us more options, currently 4k gaming is very expensive or a slideshow.

I am not talking about 4K even. Anything above SXGA is probably good enough without any AA. And to play with good FPS at UXGA, FHD and WUXGA you don't really need anything more than a good mid-range card. 😀

Depends on the pixel size. As long as you can see them, then AA is a must-have to get best gaming experience possible.

For example I am playing this game on 20'' LCD at 1600x1200 and jaggies are still visible and disturbing. Unfortunately I can't afford to turn on antialiasing as the Ti 4600 is not fast enough for it.

dr_st wrote:

I am not talking about 4K even. Anything above SXGA is probably good enough without any AA. And to play with good FPS at UXGA, FHD and WUXGA you don't really need anything more than a good mid-range card. 😀

I find aliasing extremely distracting even at Full HD, and the first thing I do in every game is to enable some form of AA. It doesn't have to be the most taxing one, anything above 2x MSAA cuts if for me, and I'd rather disable AF than AA.

Anyway, its not about resolution, its about pixel density. Once pixel density gets high enough, you can do away with AA, but my 1080p 24" monitor is FAR from getting to that point. It might not be as necessary with, for example, a full HD 15.6" laptop screen.

I actually hardly ever bother with AA. Yup, I do see the pixels if I look closely, but! ...
1) As soon as I'm too busy gaming and trying to survive, I really don't notice these anymore.
2) Why would new games's aliasing bother me now if it didn't bother me 10 years ago?

I see it, but I rather have more frames/second and perhaps some nice extra effects instead of having to put my system to hard work for something that just doesn't bother me a lot in the first place 😜

havli wrote:

Depends on the pixel size. As long as you can see them, then AA is a must-have to get best gaming experience possible.

Nothing is a "must-have". AA is merely one feature that can improve how the game looks. Specifically, it is one that is
(a) one of the computationally-heaviest, thus more taxing on the hardware,
(b) one that fixes only a very particular issue, visible only in specific areas of the image, only during certain types of scenes, and only if you focus all your attention there.

Hence, for all these reasons it's the absolute lowest on my priority list of features to enable in order to get better graphics.

AA improves graphics, not gaming experience. If anything, in case your hardware is marginal, it will hurt your gaming experience by dropping FPS too low.

alexanrs wrote:

I find aliasing extremely distracting even at Full HD, and the first thing I do in every game is to enable some form of AA. It doesn't have to be the most taxing one, anything above 2x MSAA cuts if for me, and I'd rather disable AF than AA.

Well, these things are inherently subjective. If you find it distracting, then it is distracting for you, and I can't argue with that. 😉

Tetrium wrote:

I actually hardly ever bother with AA. Yup, I do see the pixels if I look closely, but! ...
1) As soon as I'm too busy gaming and trying to survive, I really don't notice these anymore.
2) Why would new games's aliasing bother me now if it didn't bother me 10 years ago?

Well, regarding (2), a claim can be made that when the graphics are overall more advanced, then imperfections are more disturbing. But your first claim nails into on the head exactly for me. Apparently, though, there are players who get so distracted that they can't play properly. 😀

Personally, I hold the belief that people who get bothered by jaggies so much that they distract them from the game have something wrong with their head. Some kind of OCD, I suppose. But then again, it can just as easily be me who has a mental disorder, for being so bothered by AA and fans of AA. 😁

To me it's not so much the jaggies or pixels, it's the crawling you see when things move. SSAA just gives you this photo-realistic, and consistent throughout the scene, look.

I've made a video on this actually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVqYpSqbrIw

It's not perfect, but you get the idea.

What is most important is the implementation of AA and AF.
Early videocards only had supersampling and bruteforce AF. So 4xAA meant that for every pixel it had to render 4 complete pixels, and for 16xAF it had to take 16 samples from the textures.

Later MSAA was introduced, which only rendered the z-buffer at higher resolution, and would only render multiple pixels when the z-buffer indicated an edge. Otherwise it would just render 1 pixel and copy it to all pixels inside the current block.

For AF we got adaptive sampling, where the angle was used to estimate the number of samples required for good enough texture filtering. This meant that in practice the difference between ~4xAF and 16xAF was virtually non-existent in terms of performance, since you rarely needed more than 4x sampling in the image.

Combining MSAA with AF also made things faster, since it usually only had to render 1 pixel, so it only had to sample the textures once.

The Radeon 9700 was the first 'modern' GPU in terms of these efficient MSAA and AF approaches, where turning on 4xAA and 16xAF would generally only get about 30% performance hit in games.
Newer GPUs also have some extra 'cheats' with texturing, such as only performing trilinear filtering under certain circumstances.

Memory bandwidth is important for both. But well, AA is done on the rendertarget, so it requires pixel fillrate. And AF is done during texture sampling, so it needs texel fillrate.
Most important though is a smart approach. Not having to sample textures and not having to render pixels is always faster.
Or as Jim Blinn said: The fastest way to draw something is not to draw it.

Tetrium wrote:

2) Why would new games's aliasing bother me now if it didn't bother me 10 years ago?

It's probably similar to audiophile stuff, my friend. 😉 I was happy with warm-sounding speakers like Wharfedale Diamonds and even desktop speakers like Edifier, but then I purchased a pair of vintage JBL 120Ti, heard them playing cymbals, and since then I could never go back.

Well I guess I have to praise 3dfx for it. Despite being the loser to nVidia, it managed to start something that was followed by the winner; FSAA, that is. And I couldn't help but wonder; had 3dfx never promoted FSAA on the first place, would nVidia ever touch it? I mean, wasn't it the time where frame rate was king?

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

To me it's not so much the jaggies or pixels, it's the crawling you see when things move. SSAA just gives you this photo-realistic, and consistent throughout the scene, look.

I've made a video on this actually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVqYpSqbrIw

It's not perfect, but you get the idea.

To me, the best AA - is noAA at all.
With FullHD as base : 4x SSAA and DSR x4, have one thing in common with 4k...
They all require the same ammount of pixels to be processed by GPU.

But guess what ?
Native 4k will look best of all three (because it can actually show all pixels GPU is generating).

And as to performance tradeoff... IF U have GPU power to do it, there is no problem (AA and AF are 100% GPU thing).
Here's Crysis 1 at 4k (DSR'ed) with AA/AF (not maxed out, because 3GB of VRAM isn't enough to do 16xQ AA with 4k 🤣 ) : LINK

Also, performance drop is dependant heavily on the game U want to run.
Example : U don't need a GTX 780 Ti to run Half-Life 2 with SSAA and 60FPS+ 😀

dr_st wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I actually hardly ever bother with AA. Yup, I do see the pixels if I look closely, but! ...
1) As soon as I'm too busy gaming and trying to survive, I really don't notice these anymore.
2) Why would new games's aliasing bother me now if it didn't bother me 10 years ago?

Well, regarding (2), a claim can be made that when the graphics are overall more advanced, then imperfections are more disturbing. But your first claim nails into on the head exactly for me. Apparently, though, there are players who get so distracted that they can't play properly. 😀

Personally, I hold the belief that people who get bothered by jaggies so much that they distract them from the game have something wrong with their head. Some kind of OCD, I suppose. But then again, it can just as easily be me who has a mental disorder, for being so bothered by AA and fans of AA. 😁

Well, I remember watching old video tapes and the stripes and artifacting didn't bother me too much back then...unless the artifacting was so bad that it made viewing the content of the tape nearly impossible 🤣

Personally I don't hold that belief, I know of 2 persons who got dizzy when playing FPS games and both had no disorders (or they didn't bother to tell me 😜)
Another person I've known for many years even couldn't be in a moving car without having to throw up eventually, but he did finish university.

And besides, there's always something wrong with someone, but that's really not important to me as I prefer to see the good sides of someone and not a person's flaws 😀

Tetrium wrote:

I know of 2 persons who got dizzy when playing FPS games and both had no disorders (or they didn't bother to tell me 😜)
Another person I've known for many years even couldn't be in a moving car without having to throw up eventually, but he did finish university.

These are actually two variants/mainfestation of the same neurological disorder, known as "motion sickness". I don't think it's related to aliasing, though. 😀

Okay, okay, eventually to each his own regarding to AA (and everything else).

I just wonder: supposed GPU A has high pixel fill rate but low bandwidth, while GPU B is the exact opposite. All else being equal, which one has better SSAA performance?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I just wonder: supposed GPU A has high pixel fill rate but low bandwidth, while GPU B is the exact opposite. All else being equal, which one has better SSAA performance?

That depends on the software you're running.
If it uses a lot of textures, then texel fillrate will be more important than pixel fillrate, so GPU B will probably be better, because it has to do a lot of texture access per pixel.
If it uses little or no textures, GPU A will be better, because it can push the pixels to the rendertarget faster.

I think in practice more bandwidth will usually be more important, so GPU B is probably the better choice.