The Visual tab groups the most common settings related to image quality, which includes Anti-Aliasing level, Anti-Aliasing filter, Anti-Aliasing mode, Anisotropic Filtering and Vertical Synchronization control (also known as VSync). Recent Catalyst versions introduced a new Anti-Aliasing technique, called Morphological Filtering or MLAA, that can be used on HD 5000 and newer series.

Anti-Aliasing level, or just AA, determines the number of samples to be used for locating image jaggies, higher levels mean high quality image but higher GPU resource usage as well. Anti-Aliasing can be also controlled by the application, meaning you have to set the AA level inside your game’s options. This is the preferred setting if your game has in-game AA configuration. If your game lacks AA control, you can try setting the wanted level of AA here and see if it works.

EQAA for short, this Anti-Aliasing enhancement works by storing color samples on GPU Render-Back Ends that are used to further enhance the final Anti-Antialiasing quality. EQAA is a feature found only on newest HD 6900 series and it’s not supported on previous hardware families due to lack of hardware support on older GPUs.

With EQAA introduction, Anti-Aliasing level can now be either Application controlled, Enhance application settings or Override application settings. The first option is the well known option that leaves the Anti-Aliasing responsibility to the game engine, which in turn tells the API where AA should be applied and the number of samples/quality of AA should be used. The second is the new option that still leaves the AA duties to the game engine, but use the game engine defined number of samples and enhance it. Let’s say you have AA 4x set on your game, by using Enhance application settings the driver will apply 4xQ level to the image. The last option, Override application settings, ignores the game engine AA level and leaves to the driver the AA processing. This is the last option for a reason, as you should always use the game AA settings whenever possible. Overriding application settings for AA doesn’t work for every game because the driver recognize the engine.

Anti-Aliasing filter is a hardware feature introduced since HD 2000 series launch, it can be the standard Box filter shared by IHVs, and can be also one of the custom filters provided by the driver. Currently, all series support Narrow-tent, Wide-tent and Edge-detect filters with exception of HD 6000 series, which dropped Narrow-tent and Wide-tent filters, supporting only the former Box filter and the best quality Edge-detect filter.

The filter type determines the overall image quality, the Box filter is the standard which delivers good quality and performance. The Narrow-tent and Wide-tent filters tend to blur the polygon edges too much, making the overall image too blurry, but some games may look better with those filters. And finally the Edge-detect filter, this one uses very advanced algorithms to produce the best image quality, but with a high utilization of GPU resources.

Anti-Aliasing mode determines how transparent textures are going to be anti-aliased by the driver. The modes depend on the graphics card series, until HD 5000 they can Performance and Quality. On HD 5000 and newer series it can be Multi-sample AA, Adaptive Multi-sample AA and Super-sample AA.

Anisotropic Filtering, or just AF, can be either controlled by the game or can be a value you choose. If your game has AF configuration in-game you should prefer it instead of forcing AF in the driver. If the game lacks AF control you can set a value here to improve image quality. The performance hit is small so you can experiment with 8x or 16x without degrading performance too much while improving image quality a lot.

Tessellation Control allows for fine tuning of Tessellation levels used by games/applications. Some games might use exaggerated levels of Tessellation that turns out to be overkill in a performance vs quality balance, in those cases Tessellation level can be set to a lower level resulting in better performance with little to none quality change.

AMD Optimized leaves to the driver the selection of best tessellation level depending on game/application being executed.

Vertical Synchronization, or just vsync control determines if the driver should present the image framebuffer synchronized with monitor refresh rate to avoid screen tearing, common on flat display monitors. Vsync on offers the best quality, but can degrade performance on less powered GPUs or when the game doesn’t supports Triple-buffering. You can force triple-buffering on any OpenGL application through the driver, but Direct3D games can’t be forced by the driver to use triple-buffering. RadeonPro comes to the rescue by allowing triple-buffering utilization on almost all Direct3D games, with rare exceptions. You will learn more about forced triple-buffering as you advanced through the topics.