Guild Wars 2

Anyone knowledgeable on both?

I want to know what I get from both and what the differences between them are

fxaa is blurrier but almost “free” performance wise.
smaa is slower but better quality
they’re both post processing AA methods that are designed to give many of the benefits of traditional multisampling AA without the massive performance hit.

Generally, SMAA is the way to go in my opinion, but it’s really a matter of taste.

There are some people who think that no AA is better than FXAA. They all agree that SMAA is the way to go if your computer can handle it.

GW2 allow you to change settings on the fly and you can see your fps at the same time. Just stand in a zone and change it around.

If you have a good enough graphics card from the last 3 years, FXAA/SMAA high/SMAA low or none for that matter makes absolutely zero difference to fps because GW2 is completely CPU bound.

FXAA – Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing
SMAA – Subpixel Morphological Anti Aliasing

http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/

Both are post process shaders which looks at the completed frame, “guess” where edges are and then blur the pixels along them. SMAA is about 25-200% slower than FXAA but is still many times faster than MSAA (multi-sample anti-aliasing).

SMAA does a much better job with the guessing and therefore you are less likely to see textures blur which is the primary issue with FXAA. SMAA High is better but slower than SMAA Low is better but slower than FXAA.

The link above includes a link to a paper on the subject. Just look at the pictures and tables on performance (from back in 2012) in the supplementary materials.

Or you can check out the demo video which shows examples in motion.

I noticed a lot of us got an improvement in graphical performance as well after the recent build. Before today, I was only on native sampling and all low settings, now I have a few things on high and medium and all the check boxes checked by default, after auto-detecting. Also its on FXAA by default, when before today, it wasn’t able to use it unless I force it.

mrauls.6519:

Anyone knowledgeable on both?

I want to know what I get from both and what the differences between them are

SMAA is good anti aliasing. FXAA is taking a big blurry —-- on your game.

Like people are saying FXAA is blurrier but very little hit, SMAA is sharper but more of a hit. I found that the SMAA available from something such as ReShade is actually better and a lower fps hit than the one that Gw2 offers if fps is an issue for you.