Is it possible to set anti-alias at 200 for some distance around camera (50 feet say) and then anti-alias at 80 for everything beyond 50 feet. In post process it seems to be a general on/off. Or is there a similar strategy with level of detail. I am not familiar with level of detail yet but I assume it is similar to anti-aliasing? I am trying to figure out ways to keep high anti-alias and high frame rate (which you probably already knew).
Thanks
No LOD is very different to AA. LOD basically means, that your model is beeing replaced with higher or lower Quality versions depending on distance to the camera. For example a character has 60.000 Polys in it’s high level, let’s say you move away 10 Meter and it switches to one only sporting 15.000 and further 5000 down to maybe 1000. About AA…don’t know, there are so many versions of AA around.
Anti-Aliasing is performed after the scene has been rendered to the GBuffers and although there is the concept of depth even at that stage, it wouldn’t help you to turn down the quality for some pixels based on their scene depth since it’s all a screen-space effect. You’ll just end up with patchy aliasing - and distant objects (which can be the worst offenders for aliasing artifacts) will start to jitter heavily.
Aside from that, it’s also hard to perform aliasing that way since it add an additional cost of it’s own to filter the quality based on depth - probably more than it does to just process the entire scene for the same cost. The varying performance of the AA based on what’s on-screen also makes it hard to tune for any given scenario.
Try switching to FXAA if TAA is performing badly - but in all honesty the engines TAA solution is probably the best of it’s kind right now, aside from the motion artefacts.
Yeah I like TAA quite a bit better then FXAA. It’s ok, playing with the LOD groups is essentially what I’m after. Naively it seemed like you might get a similar increase in performance with dynamic anti-aliasing. Appreciate info.
No worries 
but yeah using LOD’s is the best way to get some performance back when things are off in yonder distance.