@chazore -- Same here. crysis 3 has txaa , smaa up to 4times and then msaa. When i did research, i was told that txaa is worst and i have heard from people here that msaa is the best for AA. i am playing crysis 3 with 8msaa with a 980 and for me the framerate is smooth. i tried 4msaa and for me its the same for visuals lol.Got noob eyes when it comes to noticing the slightest difference when it comes to the pc graphical options . Would OC 980 get 60fps with 8msaa?

Not all AA is of the same quality, the effect of AA varies from game to game even if the method of AA is the same 

Based on what you said, I can tell that the game doesn't provided high quality AA.If you don't care about spending some time, I would suggest that you learn to use Nvidia inspector, since it provides the best AA there is.

With Nvidia inspector you can use SSAA and SGSSAA x2 of any of those methods provides better results than the MSAA provided in most games, while also having less of a performance hit.

@kirin_gaming --- what about HSAA? From my research it was said that SGSSAA can cause blurring and that it may not work well with many games and that its best to use 4msaa with 4sgssaa to get good visual for AA

I'd just go with 4X, since MSAA can be really taxing on framerate.

If you're using one of Nvidia's Maxwell cards, you'll have MFAA available to you, which basically lets you double the amount of MSAA without decreasing performance.

@sentient_nebula --- would a 980 have that option?

Yes SGSSAA can cause blurring in some games, and yes it is used in conjuction with the driver's MSAA.To fix the blurring you have to change the game's LOD's, but most of the time it's better to use SSAA instead of SGSSAA if you find blurring in a game.

my suggests turn off AA completely and use DSR.

isn't that pretty much the same as SSAA / FSAA though? just rendering the scene at a higher res and then downsampling it? I guess you are not limited to using powers of 2 with DSR

Yeah I also found this guide to help explain them lol, I'm eventually going to grab a 980 since I've seen how well that performed for a friend on Shadow of Mordor.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1rb964/antialiasing_modes_explained/

What I reckon we need when it comes to settings and changing them is say a slider like the one Nvidia provides but contained within each game's settings menu, hell they could just go with the before and after type pics so you can spot the difference there and then instead of opening your brower, searching for a game and hoping it has a slider with options to notice the differences, I suck at trying to remember how a game looks without settings A to settings B when it comes to choosing the right settings for me which is why I rely on either maxing the settings till FPS takes a hit, find a few slider pics or look up tweak guides like I did for Titanfall to get decent visuals but stable 60fps with my current setup.

Chazore i have checked a few videos and it close to 60fps but their cpu is lower then mine since i have a i7 5930k cpu . i mean if i can't see the difference, then no point sacrificing performance with a higher msaa like 8msaa lol. HOw do you check fps for crysis 3?