Anti-Aliasing is pretty much a smoothing of the edges
Such as suppose you have a circle, and the circle is blue, with a black border. Normally it will appear very blocky and "pixelated". Well what the antialiasing does is take mid tone colors and fills the circle in, in specific spots of course. This will make it appear more round, and clean looking.
Also, AF is anisotropic filtering. This pretty much cleans up words when they are on a slope, so they dont look so fuzzy, or distorted. So say your looking at a letter. And your point of view is like a 25 degree angle. With AF, the words on top will not look so blurry. Sorry for such a shitty analogy, but its kinda hard to explain.
his computer looks like it can handle that. I think it is a driver issue. Anyways even if his GPU was weak, it would still work, but the framerates would be horrible.
Ok thanks. Ill upgrade drivers later. So is AF ONLY for text? If so why is it such a big deal, and why does it take so much processing power to handle it.
Yes it doesnt only do text. But also little things that you wouldnt notice so much. Such as things at an angle, such as windows and such. This is done by by taking texture samples. Which Nvidia only takes 64 per pixel, while ATI takes 128 texture samples per pixel. It is alot more complicated then just text and little things, but slopes and planes and shit like that which the video card has to render.