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Anti-aliasing: a brief review Dave's DefinitionAliasing appears as a "staircase" or "jagged-edge" effect which is the result of mapping vectors to pixels using an all-on-all-off strategy (either the pixel is considered part of the edge, or it's not).Anti-aliasing is a technique used to minimize the visual jagginess of edges. It visually smooths edges by capitalizing on the fact that pixels are small.
Why is it important? - Aliasing can appear very unrealistic. - It is particularly noticeable when objects are in motion. - In video games, anti-aliasing can dramatically affect framerate.
Anti-aliasing in action Very aliased image Very anti-aliased image
Effects on Performance Extremely high-quality anti-aliasing
Overview of algorithms Supersampling (SSAA): most expensive highest quality "brute force" Multisampling (MSAA): more efficient works with primitives instead of pixels Fast approximate (FSAA): extremely efficient "post-processing" can cause excessive blur Enhanced subpixel morphological (SMAA): "divide and conquer" combination of various methods Temporal: a completely different approach used in conjunction with other methods requires high framerate
Other approaches TXAA: A recent (2012) approach by NVIDIA's Timothy Lottes, based on temporal anti-aliasing.