Allright, for starters, anyone who wants to try to emulate what I am doing First and foremost start off with adding these to your User.cfg.
cl_fov=74
gp_option_ShowCockpitGlass=0
r_HDRGrainAmount=0.0
r_DepthOfField=0
r_TexMinAnisotropy=16 (Texture Filtering)
r_TexMaxAnisotropy=16 (Texture Filtering)
e_ShadowsMaxTexRes=2048 (Very High is 1024)
e_DecalsLifeTimeScale=4
e_ViewDistRatio=200 (Very High is 100)
e_ViewDistRatioVegetation=200 (Very High is 90)
e_Lods=0 (This turns level of detail for mechs off = needs more beans)
Lately I make alot of use of oversampling (Use very high resolutions and scale the image down) This is one of the oldest and most primitive forms of AA.
You need to setup a custom resolution which is higher then your desired final image size. Lately I have been uploading photos using Desired Resolution * 1.275
2560(1.275)x1600(1.275)=3264x2040 This is a lot of pixels to crunch, so if you wish to have nice looking 1920x1080 screenshots I recommend trying a custom resolution of 2448x1377, or perhaps even 2560x1440
So, here we have the mechbay (sorry its boring, but consistent) with the Mech of choice being my Battlemaster with Hotrod (2k res rgb/spc textures)
The first thing you will notice is that with noAA selected the image is a little washed out, and if you look closely, you will find lots of jagged edges. However this has no impact and is easiest to render.
(to see the differences easily I recommend opening two or more of the images in separate tabs and switching back and forth to see the detail difference)
http://pumpgasracing...w/1200noaac.png
Now we have TXAA (Nvidia only)
TXAA is a hyper evolved SMAA/Temporal AA, it take the same frame, and slightly offsets it over the orginial frame while making error corrections, as well as applying a decent edgeAA effect, the results are nice, but this comes as the cost of texture quality, the textures will be slightly blurry, and while some may not notice, others may.
http://pumpgasracing...w/1200txaac.png
Last, we move onto MSAA, the king of AA, MSAA has the highest visual quality, but at the great cost of being a resource hog, this form of AA is what you bust out for unrivaled image quality, but be sure you pack a big GPU (or GPUs).
http://pumpgasracing...w/1200msaac.png
Now we move onto the Very high resolution section I was talking about. When you use a resolution higher then your intended presentation, you can cheat in higher fidelity, when the image is resized in any good image editing software it will make a pass over to see what colors should be were and in the reduction can even remove imperfections while overall increasing sharpness. Go ahead and compare the orginial images to these three, they are the same final size, but the difference in detail is stunning.
NoAA Re-sample.
http://pumpgasracing...samplenoaac.png
TXAA Re-sample.
http://pumpgasracing...sampletxaac.png
MSAA Re-sample.
http://pumpgasracing...samplemsaac.png
I hope this is informative.