My auto High settings for skyrim gives me 8x AA and 8x AF ,

What do you guys put here if you going for best performance and picture, 8xaa and 8xaf or lets sa 2x aa and 16af?

No antialiasing + 16x AF.

Antialiasing and my computer are not happy together. FXAA is good though.

It set me up with 8 on both and it looks great and runs great for me. I only have a 550ti card.

From what i understand Anisotropic filtering is the ''sharpnes/detail'' on the textures? and AA the ruff edges?

But how much diff is there between 8/16x in Anisotropic filtering, 8x seems pretty high? in AA i ussaly stay at 2x, cuse i feel the effect it does over performance aint worth it

16x AF is a must for any game. It's will make distance objects look much better at not much performance jump (usually 5% or so of your FPS in most games over 0x AF). You should always want atleast 2x AA too, but i prefer 4x or 8x. Then theres transparancy AA.. but thats a whole 'nother story.

I personally have 0 fps loss between 0x aa/0x af and 8x AA/16x AF on my GTX 580 in the game... but Skyrim seems to not fully utilize the card at all times so this is probably why.

Anisotropic Filtering helps make textures viewed at highly oblique angles not appear muddy and crummy.

This.

Antialiasing is a processing eating monster. I'm going with no AA at all, only turning on FXAA, and the image quality is amazing anyway thanks to full HD.

May suggestion is turning AA on, and if your performance is bad then disable it.

well im sitting on:

i5 760
asus gtx 560 ti


so i cant have it all

But whats diff between the AA and FXAA? 'heard that the FXAA gives an ''overall less sharp picture''

Always use 16xAF. There's almost no difference in performance with todays graphics cards. AA is what hits fps usually. Unless the CPU is the bottleneck, which is the case with practically every CPU in Skyrim. Here's an example: I have an i5 2500 and a GeForce GTX570. The difference in fps between 8xMSAA/16xAF and no AA/noAF is.... NOTHING. That's right I get the same framerate with full AA/AF or no AA/AF. The only difference is it looks like [censored] with no AA/AF

AA becomes more useless the higher resolution you render at.
AF becomes more useful the higher resolution you render at.

I'm probably a special case, but I generally find that AA makes games look bad, the effect appears blurry to me, no idea why that is.
Even without AA, I normally don't even notice any aliasing at my 1920 x 1200 resolution.