Crysis 3 - Anti-aliasing Performance

As well as its four detail pre-sets, Crysis 3 also boasts a number of different anti-aliasing techniques with which to smooth away those jaggies. We've benchmarked Both the GTX 680 2GB and the Radon HD 7970 3GB GHZ Edition at each available AA setting at 1,920 x 1,080.


Applying FXAA, had zero impact on frame rates, whilst SMAA (sub-pixel morphological anti-aliasing) also had minimal impact at its x1 and x2 settings, demonstrating the efficiency of this method of AA. While we're still not huge fans of FXAA (it tends to add a smeary blurring effect to edges), SMAA was much better at smoothing jaggies without giving the smeary effect of FXAA and is well worth enabling considering the near-non existent performance hit.

As Nvidia's TXAA is a combination of MSAA and FXAA, it's unsurprising to see that Medium TXAA and MSAA x2 both produce the same result, with a minimal drop of 6fps (13 per cent) from 0x AA. SMAA x4 is much more intensive at it's lower settings and falls just behind medium TXAA. It's again no surprise to see high TXAA and MSAA x4 matched, while MSAA 8x remains the king of performance crippling, with a minimum frame rate of 26fps representing a 46 per cent drop from 0x AA


As with the GTX 680 2GB, the HD 7970 3GB GHz Edition felt near-zero performance hit from FXAA, SMAA or SMAA x2, and only a five percent drop when enabling MSAA x2. SMAA x 4 gave a steep hit, with a minimum frame rate only 2fps higher than MSAA x4, while MSAA x8 again showed it's performance crippling prowess with a minimum frame rate of 23fps, a 41 per cent drop from 0x AA.