Hi there,

I use KDE 4.11.5 with an Nvidia Geforce GPU and the OpenGL 3.1 backend.

I wonder, do I gain something when playing with the Nvidia antialiasing settings?

There are tons of options, anisotropic filtering, different antialiasing options and so on.

Does it make much difference with using different options? Or do you best stick with the defaults?

So far I tried different options, to be honest I do not see any difference at all....

Oh, and I use the Qt raster setting.

wouldn't this be specific for gaming and 3d?

per the Nvidia settings app help

Antialiasing Settings

Antialiasing is a technique used in OpenGL to smooth the edges of objects in a scene to reduce the jagged 'stairstep' effect that sometimes appears along the edges of 3D objects.

Do not use *any* antialiasing and especially not FXAA for kwin. In doubt create an application profile in the nvidia driver to omit kwin, since this is certainly not what you want.

Antialiasing is effectively some sort of blurring, the screen and esp. all text will become blurry for it (instead look into other features of the nvidia driver, like texture sharpening or digital vibrance)
Also it (regular) MSAA won't make any difference on the default screen (except for a major performance hit) because there's no frustum and no rotation - all textures are rendered rectangular, so there's nothing for the driver to antialias.
FXAA *does* apply to the "regular" screen as soon as glSwap is called (what will happen unless you forcefully deactivate vsync, since nvidia supports the bufferage gl extension!) You *will* see this and you will *not* like it

Anisotropic filtering only applies to LOD blending, ie. when the system *would* use mipmapped textures (a huge, a medium and a tiny one) at the same time, this (an improvement of trilinear filtering) would improve the visual result (near and far structures looking equally sharp and not blurred due to scaling)
This as well would only apply when there's a frustum (as for the cube or coverflow effect) - it has no meaning for the "regular" use - including presentwindows/desktopgrid and similar effects.