Anti-Aliasing: A VGC Thread

[caffeinade]

sc94597 said:

mZuzek said:
As a whole I don't like anti-aliasing because it just blurs everything too much. I'd rather take crisper visuals (even if the pixels show a lot more) any day, especially given how much it impacts performance.

Then again, I know nothing about the technical stuff, so quickly glancing at the OP maybe the anti-aliasing that bothers me is FXAA and there are better kinds.

SSAA, and MSAA shouldn't really blur the image at all if implemented properly (without bugs.) They work by rendering the entire image or specific assets at higher internal resolutions and then using an average of the colors provided by the extra pixels to output to the screen as a single pixel, which makes the pixel transitions look smoother than they would otherwise. SSAA does this to the whole image, while MSAA does it only to those parts which require it the most. 

Post-processing AA effects are a different category really -- they only blur the image in different ways so that hard-edges and shimmering aren't noticeable, but often with a loss of sharpness. Which is probably what you are noticing. 

Console games used to use MSAA (in the seventh generation), but because of the way game engines are designed these days, and because it might be worth it to just render the game at a higher resolution this has gone out of favor. Now console games mostly use crappy FXAA, temporal AA, or SMAA. 

Personally, since they are post-processing effects, I think they should ALWAYS be optional. 

MSAA won't work on on things like foliage unless it is real geometry.