Anti-Aliasing MultiSamples - what does this do?

Normally I'm not a PC gamer and because of that I don't know the lingo, but I'm a Civ, well, fantatic.

So before I start my first game I'd like to get my game configured and ready to roll. I've got my resolution on 1024x768 and everything else on high, but I have no idea if 0, 2 or 4 is better when it comes to this Anti-Aliasing thing.

Any help?

I've got a 2ghz AMD 64 with a Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT.

Also, Single Unit Graphics, does checking that dumb the game down or improve it visually?

Single UNit Graphics just means that instead of 3 little warriors running around you have one. I did this as part of my overall dumbing down to get the silly bugger to run. No idea if it helped the speed, but it's much less confusing for me.

antialiasing is feature to improve visiual quality. it has huge performance hit.
antialiasing is used for fonts too- when enabled letters are round, without it you can see pixelation

Anti-Aliasing MultiSamples - what does this do?

Normally I'm not a PC gamer and because of that I don't know the lingo, but I'm a Civ, well, fantatic.



Basicly causes the game to render at 2x or 4x the resolution, and then downsize it to your monitor. In general, it smoothes edges out and reduces pixelation. But unless you have a fast card, it also eats into performance.

Basicly causes the game to render at 2x or 4x the resolution, and then downsize it to your monitor.
That's incorrect, it doesn't resize anything. It only smoothes the edges by more complex pixel calculations, which decreases the performance and makes a much better image quality.

That's incorrect, it doesn't resize anything. It only smoothes the edges by more complex pixel calculations, which decreases the performance and makes a much better image quality.

there are two types of anti-aliasing, supersampling and multisampling. Supersampling does rendering at 2x. Multisampling focuses on edges.

there are two types of anti-aliasing, supersampling and multisampling. Supersampling does rendering at 2x. Multisampling focuses on edges.
Exactly. And we're not talking about super-sampling here, which is an old, hilariously awkward mode.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

I put multisampling on 4x and so far I haven't felt like I was lagging or anything.

This is a very good looking Civ game, definitley enjoying it.