I thought anti-aliasing was that thing that smoothed out the edges on 3D objects? How would that effect things in the background?

Also whenever a game offers mipmapping or antistropic filtering graphical options I always turn it off as I've never noticed a difference with it on apart from decreased frame-rates.

Also I thought the 'multi-sampling' option in the games config was for anti-aliasing, since it gives options for 'MSAA' etc.? Wouldn't that make distanced textures look better? (I'm still pretty sure anti-aliasing is all about smoothing 3D edges though.)