Aa/af?

i know aa is anti-aliasing but what is AF?

and what specifically do AA and AF do?

AA in a nutshell smooths out the jaggies. There is a more technical explanation about how its raises the resolution then shrinks it... backdown. You see the lines on the edges of walls, any lines in the game you get the pixelilated squares at the edges... it smooths it out to make it look cleaner.

Anistropic filtering... filters textures so you can see the mip level change. textures are sharper. Bilinear a similar method.. you would have a line you would see where textures would go from blurry to sharp. Trilinear did the same but with 3 sectors. Anistropic.. depending on the setting 2x 4x 8x 16x... does the same but sharper and with a seamless change.

hmmmm I was just about to make a thread about this also. I have a 9500pro and was just wondering what to set it on. Is there a combo that works the best? Like aa4/af8, aa2/af16 ect....... ? OR is it just a matter of messing around with the settting to see what you like?

It's a balance of how much your card can handle. With games like UT2K3 at full detail and AA/AF cranked all the way, only the fastest of GPUs can render frames at a decent rate (at high resolutions I might add). At any rate, try the settings out for yourself and see just what your card can handle

~THT