Gaming at 3840x2160 Anti-Alisaing Yay or Nay ?
To AA or not to use AA, that will be a question anyone with a Ultra High Definition monitor will ask him or herself. Here's the deal, if you are planning a monitor of this size, we expect you to be on SLI or Crossfire as honestly, you'll be needing it even with the slightest bit of AA enabled.
However, there will be a number of end users asking themselves, can we game at 3840x2160 with a single graphics card ? My answer will go two ways. Yay and Nay ! With traditional High Quality / Ultra image quality settings even a GeForce GTX 780 or Titan is not going to cut it. There however is a tradeoff you can make, at this resolution Anti-Aliasing really is something you could turn off or simply apply just a tiny bit. The screen resolution and pixel density is so big that jaggies really aren't THAT visible anymore. Let me again take Tomb Raider and Hitman Absolution as examples:
Yes my man, as painful as it might seem to be, this is a GeForce GTX Titan at work. Disabling AA or using FXAA (cheap AA as I like to call it) will result into acceptable framerates. Enabling SSAA in Ultra quality mode brings the 1000 EUR card to its knees. But dude, what about the lovechild of everybody, MSAA then ? Well for that we'll move to Hitman again, a title that is heavier on the GPU.
Here you can see, if you forfeit AA you can play the game at Ultra quality mode perfectly fine. 2xAA meeeh, not so much. But at 4xMSAA yeah you want SLI or Crossfire. We'll show you some numbers on that as well in this article. Just look at 8xMSAA ... that is 1000 EUR 6GB graphics card at work there. Now alternatively you could lower image quality settings. But if you spend all that dough on an expensive graphics cards, PC and monitor .. we doubt you find that acceptable.
So the conclusion is this, disable AA and you can play games in the 35~40 FPS range at good image quality settings. But you will need a feisty graphics card. The recommended route with graphics cards anno 2013 would be a Multi-GPU setup.
