Feasibility of SSAA+CMAA With Current Setup

[Erous]

Title should be SSAA, not SSMA my bad

From time to time I like to max out WoW and push my rig limits, or just let the Geforce experience choose my fate. Recently, the Geforce experience has told me to basically max wow graphics out. What does that mean?:

Everything on the highest setting
SSAA 4x
CMAA Post Process AA
200% render scale

My problem: After seeing SSMA + CMAA in WoW, I'm having a hard time dropping the settings because to me it looks that good. But my rig is screaming. Do you think it's feasible/acceptable to run the rig like this through Legion, or drop the settings?

Current Rig

Processor: i7 5820k
Clock: 4.3
Voltage: 1.210
Cooler: Corsair Hydro Series h100i
RAM: 16Gb quad channel DDR4
Graphics: GTX980
Monitor Res: 1080p

Now, running it at these settings actually is feasible, with some caveats. The biggest taxing areas in the game right now are mythic raids and your garrison area for Alliance. I ran heroic Archimonde with this setup and was around ~40FPS on average, garrison is around the same but sometimes dips to the 30s. After archimonde, I looked at my hardware monitor:

Temps: Okay
CPU: 4 Cores pegged at 100%
Graphics card: Between 99-100% usage, power consumption at 116% (I'm assuming it overclocks but I didn't look at the voltages)

[potis]

Even if i had the best system possible for WoW i would still only run 4 settings (Texture Resolution/Anisotropic/Projected Textures/Particle Density)oh and CMAA for raiding and everything else disabled or low.

Apart from those 4 (5) settings during raid everything else is irrelevant, i prefer having a 100% view of effects than Shadows or Grass.

Start using the Raid and BG setting for raiding and leave the eye candy on for everything else? At least what i would do.

[Erous]

Even if i had the best system possible for WoW i would still only run 4 settings (Texture Resolution/Anisotropic/Projected Textures/Particle Density)oh and CMAA for raiding and everything else disabled or low.

Apart from those 4 (5) settings during raid everything else is irrelevant, i prefer having a 100% view of effects than Shadows or Grass.

Start using the Raid and BG setting for raiding and leave the eye candy on for everything else? At least what i would do.

Good idea, but when I look at the raid/BG options, it looks like it's just for those effects while resolution and AA options are game-wide regardless of BG/Raid options, but I could be wrong.

[potis]

Good idea, but when I look at the raid/BG options, it looks like it's just for those effects while resolution and AA options are game-wide regardless of BG/Raid options, but I could be wrong.

Moment you disable Shadows and the left settings and lower view distance/environment etc etc, you will understand the difference.

I literally play on Low apart from those 4 settings since 2005 and i always had, up to know a PC that could always handle WoW, (2600K@4.5Ghz+580 that got replaced by a 970) i just dont care for fluff effects when i raid.

Since you want to keep running SSAA+CMAA on 200% Render, then start lowering the other fluff, aka most if not all of the left side of settings, excluding Particle Density.

You will still dip, cause raiding = CPU but instead of 40 i suppose you will see a 55 with those shit off.

[Tauton]

Don't forget that 200% render scale is 4k - (it does x2 width and x2 height, so you end up with 4k). If you were going to lower anything, i'd suggest lowering that to 133% or 150% and see if you notice any difference except much better framerate.

[krunksmash]

Title should be SSAA, not SSMA my bad

From time to time I like to max out WoW and push my rig limits, or just let the Geforce experience choose my fate. Recently, the Geforce experience has told me to basically max wow graphics out. What does that mean?:

Everything on the highest setting
SSAA 4x
CMAA Post Process AA
200% render scale

My problem: After seeing SSMA + CMAA in WoW, I'm having a hard time dropping the settings because to me it looks that good. But my rig is screaming. Do you think it's feasible/acceptable to run the rig like this through Legion, or drop the settings?

Current Rig

Processor: i7 5820k
Clock: 4.3
Voltage: 1.210
Cooler: Corsair Hydro Series h100i
RAM: 16Gb quad channel DDR4
Graphics: GTX980
Monitor Res: 1080p

Now, running it at these settings actually is feasible, with some caveats. The biggest taxing areas in the game right now are mythic raids and your garrison area for Alliance. I ran heroic Archimonde with this setup and was around ~40FPS on average, garrison is around the same but sometimes dips to the 30s. After archimonde, I looked at my hardware monitor:

Temps: Okay
CPU: 4 Cores pegged at 100%
Graphics card: Between 99-100% usage, power consumption at 116% (I'm assuming it overclocks but I didn't look at the voltages)

turn off SMAA+CMAA and use Nvidia DSR. allowing it to render at 1440P or 4K before squeezing it down to 1080P and turning on 4xMSAA with 100% render scale will net just as good a result with out turning your whole system into an oven.

turn off SSAO this setting is a resource hog and does nothing for a cartoony game like wow

[Erous]

Moment you disable Shadows and the left settings and lower view distance/environment etc etc, you will understand the difference.

You are absolutely right. Tried lowering shadows from Super ultra to just ultra or High and there's a significant improvement off the bat in terms of FPS and general gameplay when the CPU and GPU are already being taxed

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Don't forget that 200% render scale is 4k - (it does x2 width and x2 height, so you end up with 4k). If you were going to lower anything, i'd suggest lowering that to 133% or 150% and see if you notice any difference except much better framerate.

I did notice this too. I swapped from 200 to 180 and 160, etc. and I was able to gain ~10 fps or so per drop, so I may play with this a bit as well. Only oddity is that the AA settings read as 'Custom' instead of SSAA 4, but I'm assuming it's still using SSAA just at the different render scale

- - - Updated - - -

turn off SMAA+CMAA and use Nvidia DSR. allowing it to render at 1440P or 4K before squeezing it down to 1080P and turning on 4xMSAA with 100% render scale will net just as good a result with out turning your whole system into an oven.

My only issue with this is that the text and other areas of the game became just too damn blurry and the 1440p render enlarges the screen to the new resolution and my mouse gets slow as hell unless I bump up the speed to compensate...then when I switch back to windows my mouse is flying off the screen. Any suggestions are reducing blur with DSR?

[krunksmash]

You are absolutely right. Tried lowering shadows from Super ultra to just ultra or High and there's a significant improvement off the bat in terms of FPS and general gameplay when the CPU and GPU are already being taxed

- - - Updated - - -



I did notice this too. I swapped from 200 to 180 and 160, etc. and I was able to gain ~10 fps or so per drop, so I may play with this a bit as well. Only oddity is that the AA settings read as 'Custom' instead of SSAA 4, but I'm assuming it's still using SSAA just at the different render scale

- - - Updated - - -



My only issue with this is that the text and other areas of the game became just too damn blurry and the 1440p render enlarges the screen to the new resolution and my mouse gets slow as hell unless I bump up the speed to compensate...then when I switch back to windows my mouse is flying off the screen. Any suggestions are reducing blur with DSR?

Text burl is an issue I haven't heard of before but you can try increasing the font size a bit.

[DeltrusDisc]

Let's see... so I've got the 5820K@4.2GHz and a GTX 970 and wow...

I'm just in Icecrown right now doing Argent Tourny dailies, I've been using CMAA only, pushing the 100 fps limit I set for the game, mind you, I'm also playing at 3440x1440!

I switched it to SSAAx4 + CMAA and HOLY CRAP my fps PLUMMETED to about 12 fps. XD

Set it to just SSAAx4 and it went to mid 40s... this is just standing in front of the tent with the attack hippogryphs for the kraken daily. rofl

Thus, I can conclude... I NEED A GTX 1080 (Ti?)

So... I take it I'm not really going to see the benefits of these settings in a zone like IC though, correct? Since it's old stuff that wasn't made with these forms of AA in mind?

This is an interesting thread and I'm joining it. ^_^ Interested to learn more about all of these new higher settings for WoW. :P

[krunksmash]

when it comes to AA you have 3 options that are viable in WoW.

FXAA (Low end systems) - this is AA for potato systems, its low cost but its also a but ugly as it can blur things. its a post process AA and while fast and low cost is really not the best option.

MSAA ( mid - high end system ) - this is the universal gold standard for AA most mid-range cards can handle x2@1080P and high end cards can handle x8@1080P. this is a sample based AA, as the name states it takes multiple samples of a scene then super samples ( renders at high resolution before scaling down to display resolution ) only the edges of textures. this option has only been beat by 1 other AA type and thats SSAA but its not used as its stupidly hard on a system trying to render in real time.

Render scale ( upper mid - high end systems ) - this is the 3rd option turning this up does basically what Nvidia DSR or SSAA does in that it lets each frame be rendered at x% of the display resolution. Ex: 1080P display resolution with 200% render scale means each frame is rendered at roughly 4K before the system finishes processing and pushing it out at 1080P this allows for a sharper picture with out AA but can be rough on most GPU's.

there are other options for edge smoothing but these are the 3 built in option I suggest for wow players.

[Tauton]

Erous - I just wrote a load out but Krunksmash has said it all =) One thing to note, SSAA does affect text, MSAA does not - hence the crappy look of text far away even with high MSAA.

SSAA also enlarges by x times, not x% MSAA also doesn't super sample (that's what SSAA does, hence SS.. =P ) , but what he said was close enough.

Pretty much SSAA x4 with 200% render scaling = 4k, enlarged 4 times before being compressed again. I would suggest you use SSAA 2x or 4x with little to no render and see what you think, then bump the render up slowly until you see no difference.

This video is very helpful and answers everything that's being asked here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm_8ag7oPs0

[krunksmash]

Erous - I just wrote a load out but Krunksmash has said it all =) One thing to note, SSAA does affect text, MSAA does not - hence the crappy look of text far away even with high MSAA.

SSAA also enlarges by x times, not x% MSAA also doesn't super sample (that's what SSAA does, hence SS.. =P ) , but what he said was close enough.

Pretty much SSAA x4 with 200% render scaling = 4k, enlarged 4 times before being compressed again. I would suggest you use SSAA 2x or 4x with little to no render and see what you think, then bump the render up slowly until you see no difference.

This video is very helpful and answers everything that's being asked here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm_8ag7oPs0

hense the word " basically " the ingame renderscale is % based but the end result is about the same. both render it at high resolution. puting them in the super sample catagory.

[Erous]

E
Pretty much SSAA x4 with 200% render scaling = 4k, enlarged 4 times before being compressed again. I would suggest you use SSAA 2x or 4x with little to no render and see what you think, then bump the render up slowly until you see no difference.

This video is very helpful and answers everything that's being asked here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm_8ag7oPs0

Thanks all for the solid replies. This is what I'm going to do and basically play it by ear as far as Legion goes. @Deltrus you're right about it depending on where you are. With SSAA X4 and post process AA, I get 90+ frames in shrine. If I go back to the garrison it's BLAM! 35 frames

I hope this post helps others decide what they want to do with their decently high-end rigs and how best to set the AA options.

[Cilraaz]

I would suggest you use SSAA 2x or 4x with little to no render and see what you think, then bump the render up slowly until you see no difference.

This isn't a thing in WoW. When you set SSAA 4x (2x doesn't exist in WoW), it automatically runs at a 200% render scale. Modifying the render scale will then show your AA type as "Custom".