AA or FPS?

I wanted to know your opinions. For a descent video card having Antialising will reduce the FPS, but not much, may be a couple. For instance, when I play HF2 ep. 1., in high video intensive scenes, my FPS are 22 without AA and 20 with 2x AA. Obviously 2x AA looks nicer. On the other hand, it is difficult to tell the difference between 20 and 22 FPS, but I think I can tell in the handling precision of the mouse. Well, I'm getting too complicated, so:
What is your opinion, do you favor on these cases AA or FPS?

 

AA is the last thing I worry about when tweaking a game. AA is not that important as I'd rather have more frames per second and more actual detail.

 

1) Prefer only has one "f" in it
2) Why not both? I'll up the AA until I get unacceptable FPS. If that's no AA, then so be it. Older games pumping fewer polygons and effects get 8x FSAA, lots of texture filtering. New ones with more shaders and such get 2x or none.

 

I prefer FPS over AA if it comes down to one or the other.
If I have excess FPS then I enable AA so it looks better, otherwise I ignore it.
Having a smoother gaming experience is more important to me than having a better looking one, if the better looking one plays choppily.

 

Only if I have more-than-necessary FPS (55+) do I think about enabling AA. I usually do not use it. The only game I had it enabled in was CS:S, but unfortunately after moving to Windows Vista, I lost my overclocking ability and my overall video performance dropped in addition to that, so adding AA is not a practical option for any game right now.

 

A better video card works miracles. Geforce 8800GTX + max AA + max AF = awesome. Sometimes it's unnecessary to worry about FPS vs. AA

 

AA is always first priority until I drop below ~25FPS.

 

i prefer AA unless frames drop too low (~25)

 

I dont even really know what aa looks like

I turn on aa just for benchmark purposes and it makes the game run slower and I dont even like how it makes it look. Some ati cards do AA without making the fps go down.
Im trying to put myself in their shoes and say turn it on then if its a couple fps. But honestly I dont even care about it that much

for me 'best looking' is at highest resolution with highest textures. The aa is just in the borders between the textures it smooths out the line. I actually think it looks cooler without it but it depends on the game.

 

I will take FPS any day over AA. On some games though, AA works great, an example of this is guild wars. I can run it fine with AA on my x300 with max settings so I do. I will always go for FPS first though.

 

I agree. I want the game as smooth as possible.


*b00m h34dsh0t*

 

I prefer at leas 2x aa. I hate the rippled lines arround every object. In the old games it wasn't a problem for me, but now every object is getting smaller and is getting more detail. So that's why i wan't to use at least 2x aa in the newer games.

 

Granted I'm falling way behind in the games that I play, but I like to play at the highest resolution possible. That said, the last time I played with AA on and off side-by-side, I think I actually liked how it looked without AA. That was in SW Battlefront II. So I guess that puts me on the "prefers higher FPS" side of this poll.

 

I voted for FPS.
AA is kinda like icing on the cake. It's no point eating icing if there's no cake (FPS) under it.
Lousy analogy.

 

I think that's pretty good actually.

 

That was an awesome analogy.