IMO, it looks better without the driver forced settings, my FPS hit a huge wall when I tried STR with driver settings cranked to max.
EDIT: Scratch that, looks awesome! Highly recommend it, however make it an app specific setting or your other games may lagz0rus
I'm confused now.
I don't know if you mean AF or AA now, but at least on my card (GeForce 8800 GT) the Launcher's anisotropic filtering setting does remarkably little. It has some effect but not much.
Additionally, anisotropic filtering in modern GPU's causes remarkably little performance loss and it can pretty safely be set to forced 16xAF from the driver control panel with no adverse effects. I use that as global setting. This has been consistent since my first GPU which was a GeForce 6600 and I could never see any performance hit from anisotropic filtering being forced to 16xAF. And, in my opinion, it looks a LOT better than the launcher-set, engine-driven filtering option.
Anti-aliasing, however, is a lot more resource-intensive and I concur that making application-specific setups for games of different hunger for performance is recommendable, but if you want the anti-aliasing, do
not set anti-aliasing to application-controlled in the case of FreeSpace2 Open, because when there's no AA used by the application, well, you get my point.
What comes to the strength of AA, I personally think it's best to use at least 4xAA or none at all. My old 7600GT could use 4xAA with good frame rates on FS2_Open but I couldn't use any on IL-2 Sturmovik to achieve passable frame rates, though I could use 8xAA for glory shots. On my new 8800GT I can use up to 8xAA with both IL-2 and FS2_Open with negligible frame rate loss in most missions, and games like Mass Effect can easily use either 4xAA or even 8xAA most of the time. It depends a lot on what card you have and how much memory it has; anti-aliasing is a memory-unfriendly feature so the moar VRAM the better AA effect you can use.
