Render Scale Vs Antiailiasing

[TehVoyager]

Today I'm going to talk about something else in regards to leeching a few more FPS out of wow while keeping the game looking good.

Since it was first included, most people are simply slapped on MSAA / and Anisotropic filtering and called it a day. however, an option was added in 6.1 called Render Scale. its rather interesting and can yield some surprising results.

Renderscale works by internally increasing the rendered resolution, which is then downsampled to your screen resolution the slider goes from 50% (Reducing internal resolution, making the game blurry and poop looking) up to 200% (doubling the internal resolution, making the game look gooduns)

Some comparison screenshots, pulled from Reddit:
More Discussion below. Sorry for Big Pics, but there needed to showcase renderscale.






Now go look again, and pay attention to the FPS displayed on the first two.

From 35 FPS up to 53 FPS, WHILE maintaining the same level of graphical quality.

AMG VOY! HOW DOES I SHOT RENDERSCALE WEB?!?!?

Options, System, Advanced. I personally don't see a difference between 150 and 200, so i have mine set at 150. Then go back to system/Graphics, and Disable Anti-Aliasing and set Texture Filtering to Biliniar.. In addition, Make sure your settings in your Nvidia or AMD control panels are not set to Force AA/Anisotropic on.


(You can run with both on if you have a beast rig for more Good Lookins, but remember, this is going to be a bit more Taxing on the system.)

[SAP_Pete]

Changing Render Scale to something other than 100% changes Anti-Aliasing to "Custom" for me. Setting AA then to "none" changes Render Scale back to 100%. If I set AA to "none" and THEN change render scale, it changes AA to "Custom".
Texture Filtering also has no "disabled" option. Lowest qual option is "Bilinear".

None of the combinations give me better fps than the default settings.

[TehVoyager]

i'm rather surprised by that, when i started using render scale instead of AA i noticed a bump in FPS. perhaps its anecdotal, but we'll have to see. regarding tex filtering i'll fix that. thanks :P

and i'm seeing the AA Custom thing too.i believe its related to SSAA. SSAA is essentially Renderscale, except that you cant set custom values of SSAA, whereas with Renderscale you can set anything between 50 and 200. renderscale 200 would be equivalent to SSAA 4x.

[SAP_Pete]

There might be some more factors going into this (hardware, drivers, environment, etc).
I did just run some /timetest from Dark Portal to Cosmowrench to minimize variance due to player activity. Ran each test twice for consistency.

Graphics 10, 100% Render scale, AA FXAA High, Texture 16x An
FPS Min 23 / Max 252 / Avg 132
FPS Min 24 / Max 253 / Avg 132

Graphics 10, 150% Render scale, AA Custom, Texture Bilinear
FPS Min 13 / Max 235 / Avg 95
FPS Min 28 / Max 248 / Avg 95

[TehVoyager]

thanks for the in depth testing, great to see people doing research to see how this stuff relates to there own hardware.

i found a gain of FPS on my hardware setup (fx-8320 OC to 4ghz, 16gb ram, Sapphire R9 285 Dual-x OC 2gb GPU), but stuff like this is entirely related to YOUR setup. testing is always the best way to go hands down before deciding on a configuration.

Givin some rep for providing a good example to others

[SAP_Pete]

thanks for the in depth testing, great to see people doing research to see how this stuff relates to there own hardware.

i found a gain of FPS on my hardware setup (fx-8320 OC to 4ghz, 16gb ram, Sapphire R9 285 Dual-x OC 2gb GPU), but stuff like this is entirely related to YOUR setup. testing is always the best way to go hands down before deciding on a configuration.

Givin some rep for providing a good example to others

Thanks, and +rep for your efforts.
FYI, my hardware setup is i7-6700K @ 4ghz, 16 GB mem, AMD Radeon R9 290x 4GB, Windows 7 SP1

[Confucius]

I get the same FPS with MSAA and SSAA 8x and 2x2 (4x) respectively. The advantage that SSAA has over MSAA is that it renders the whole image at a higher resolution so the textures look much better when compared to MSAA anti aliasing. If you want some really good looking anti aliasing then the best you can get is sparse grid supersampling SGSSAA, but sadly wow does not support that. I am not a fan of FXAA at all because it just works by blurring the image, CMAA works similarly but isn't quite as bad as FXAA because it doesn't blur the whole image. I wouldn't recommend using those if you want the best looking game. As far as texture goes I would just leave it on 16x anisotropic filtering, it looks the best and has very, very little performance impact if any at all.

A strange thing I have noticed is that sometimes my fps will drop to the 30s or lower but if I disable AA and then reenable it the fps will go back up to 100+ like expected.