I think I am in the minority here. A lot of people would rather lower resolutions/no AA if it means a more advanced game in other areas. For me, I can deal with average textures, and assets that aren't that amazing technically , because developers are capable of  making their games look good with a nice art direction, even if it isn't technically up to par. On the otherhand though, I absolutely can't stand visual artifacts like aliasing, and dithering now that I've been accustomed to not seeing them. They distract me. When I see grass or shadows flickering because of all of the blocky edges it bothers me. I'd rather the grass be sparser or the shadows be of a lesser quality as long as they are sharp and defined without jaggies. Is anybody else with me on this? 

Depends for me what you are playing mirrors edge vs cryisis both no anti aliasing on will give you different results dueto different enverioment

Count me in there too. I'd rather have a sharp 1080p game with no textures than some giant pixels muddying up my visuals.
On PC if a game doesn't run at a stable 60fps I will turn down everything except resolution.

two things usually drive me nuts in most games, lack of good AA and screen tearing.

I don't mind muddy visuals sometimes, I usually turn off ambient occulsion because it really doesn't do that much for me, having AA turned up as much as possible and forcing Vsync on my games is a must since screen tearing completely destroys all immersion for me.

That said if I can handle the game fully I will crank it all up to max, sometimes if it's an older game I'll make use of Nvidia's DSR when possible.

I agree with your part about flickering shadows, that tends to bother me a lot of the time, I also dislike low res shadows that appear blocky as hell.

We are the minority. We are constantly shit on.

High resolution is more important to me than anything, because even the best graphics looks like crap when viewed through a jaggy, low-res lens. It's one reason I'm still so bummed about the 3DS's screen and so reluctant to get an XL. People think we're being snobs, but there's nothing wrong with wanting clarity. Hell, I would take an entire downward generation bump in a game if it meant the difference between a low- and high-res image.

You're not alone my friend.  :)

I too prefer a clean picture over one with better effects.For me AA and V-sync will always be my top priorities when it comes to graphic settings, AA is such an understimated setting...I remember when I still gamed at 1080p and used SGSSAA, at x4 all the aliased edges were completely gone, and I mean all of them.That's something that I can't achive today that I game at 4k since the most intensive AA I can use at this resolution is x2 MSAA, then is when I realized that the quality of the applied AA matters alot.

Some barely noticeable aliased edges at 4k is totally fine though, considering all the benefits that appear at this resolution, but sometimes I wished there was a higher quality option than the MSAA provided in some games,there's times that it provides no benefit whatsoever no matter how high you go.Crysis:Warhead for example had a x16 MSAA option but never got rid of all the aliasing, while x4 SGSSAA did it while having WAY less performance impact. 

Yeah I've had similar problems. I remember when I was trying to install Skyrim ENB's and they didn't let you use the default AA found in Skyrim (which got rid of all jaggies for me.) It took me forever to find an AA that would work with the Skyrim ENB and actually work (the AA that came with the ENB barely did anything, if I recall correctly it was Temporal AA and FXAA.) Same thing recently happend with Dolphin. If I use the DX9 setting I can use SSAA x 4 or x9 and it runs great with no jaggies. On the otherhand if I choose the DX11 API I get various qualities and times of AA, but if I try to go high it doesn't have near the affect of the SSAA, and it kills my performance (from 30 fps to 21 fps, whereas with 4x SSAA I get constant 30fps.) So for now I'm sticking to an earlier version of Dolphin and DX9 or OpenGL API's. 

 Point = civilization 2 for me. Great game. Looks like absolute shit. I'm not shallow :P

Native resolution makes a world of difference. Count me in.

Completely agree. I love a game with great graphics, but i find it incredibly difficult to appreciate the quality of an environment or the number of particle effects when it's being presented as a jaggy/blurry mess. It feels like i'm eating gourmet food off the floor.

A game having a poor IQ won't stop me enjoy it, but it's an annoyance i'd rather not deal with. It's why i now buy all of my multi-plats on PC. Behold, for we are the glorious IQ whore master race :p