Some of what look like specular highlights are actually coming from cube maps now, so that's not "anti-aliasing" as you'd conventionally recognise the term across the frame; it's a specific issue with rendering shadows and highlights (I assume mapping highlights of that sort is the inverse of mapping shadows of that sort.) So in fact that specific example is not "evidence nothing was fixed with regards to general AA" because it's not general AA. As of U15 the sun shining into the cabin is very clearly a dynamic cubemap implementation. When those look blocky it's usually something to do with the PCF implementation.
I'm not talking about cube map reflections. I'm talking about those high contrast edges that are very prominent on many surfaces, which are the bulk of jaggies in the screens shots and videos I've posted. I'm focusing on those reflective edges because they are obtrusive, near omnipresent, and the main area where aliasing needs to be addressed. With almost any degree of illumination, those edges are white and blur poorly with what they're bordered by. AA elsewhere, with few exceptions, has been, and remains fine. The game's SMAA in particular works well on most other edges, without causing undue blur.
Turning back to the general AA-related symptom of "it looks jaggy" then that will be much more obvious the lower the resolution goes, because the jags are jaggier. A small improvement in fidelity here would have a much greater effect on perception at lower resolutions. Comparisons at 4k are relevant to a lot of the discussion here and in no way am I saying any of those are incorrect, but they are simply not relevant to "looks better at 1080 on my low-end gear."
It's not an improvement at 1080p either (one of the first comparisons I posted was at 1080p because I was also looking at CPU bound performance) and how fast the gear is irrelevant. One architectural generation of GPU almost invariably renders something the same way, no matter what segment that GPU is in. Even between vastly different architectures it's rare for games to look appreciably different (which is why the whole RX 6000 and 7000 thing is so weird...my 5700 XT produced images that looked more like--as in utterly indistinguishable from--my RTX 4090 than my 6800 XT did with the same drivers).
The only settings that matter are resolution (including any kind of super or subsampling) and the post process AA filter selecI'm not talking about cube map reflections. I'm talking about those high contrast edges that are very prominent on many surfaces, which are the bulk of jaggies in the screens shots and videos I've posted. I'm focusing on those reflective edges because they are obtrusive, near omnipresent, and the main area where aliasing needs to be addressed. With almost any degree of illumination, those edges are white and blur poorly with what they're bordered by. AA elsewhere, with few exceptions, has been, and remains fine. The game's SMAA in particular works well on most other edges, without causing undue blur.ted (which have all always worked, just with a very subtle effect that does almost nothing to the lines in question). I can't find any evidence for a general improvement to AA.
That 1080Ti should have branch 535, current, drivers I think? Have you left those downlevel for a specific reason?
Because there is little reason to update them and less reason to believe that drivers released years after NVIDIA stopped caring about Pascal will somehow make a Pascal part render an equally forgotten title better than Ampere or Lovelace parts (aside from frame rate, it produces the same image at the same settings as my RTX 4090 does with cutting edge drivers in this game).
1080ti is fine, 2023 finally says im cpu bottlnecked, fixed by tweaking, will upgrade when rtx, a genuine new feature, is in say.. 3 games i want to play.
