Agreed on the bold.

As for the rest, FXAA has displaced MSAA to a degree since the Wii U's been out due to being a faster, cheaper alternative. Multiplats like Ghosts and Black Ops II retained MSAA on Wii U.

Vanilla FXAA tends to blur the image, its clearly visible even in 1080p. If a game is 720p FXAA doesn't do it any favours.  If a game only comes with FXAA I turn ingame AA off and force MSAA from the driver suite (Mass Effect 3 for example). If any game on my PC can't handle MSAA or SMAA I play with AA off cause I cant stand the smudge effect. Id rather have a sharp 1080p image with jaggies than blurred out texture and image details. The WiiUs eDRAM should have the bandwidth for MSAA at 720p, Microsoft's official stance was free MSAA in the 360s early days and most multiplats (even 60fps Street Fighter IV) used it.

The egde detect AA in 3D World did its job most of the time but jaggies stood out depending on the scene. 4 or 2X MSAA would have solved the problem and been crisp clean in the process.

It's just that many third party devs tend to favour FXAA now/over the last two years, because it's so simple and quick. Wii U got caught in the trend, so most of its third party efforts used FXAA on both PS3/360 and Wii U. (Though I remember in Trine 2 the AA was higher quality on Wii U)

Meanwhile its exclusives so far aren't technically very ambitious, so they just opt for edge smoothing or FXAA.

I do recall however that 90s Arcade Racer on Wii U is utilising x4 MSAA and FXAA at 720p/60fps. 

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/02/90s_arcade_racer_targeting_mid_2014_release_with_60fps_at_720p

I'm surprised consoles haven't moved to SMAA, it's actually cheaper than FXAA AND it doesn't blur the entire image. (It's all just a screen filter in the end.)

I reckon' the WiiU, Playstation 4 and Xbox One will continue on with these shader-based anti-aliasing methods, but throw it onto one of the CPU cores instead, some tasks are hard to make parallel, so might as well use a CPU core for extra features such as that and keep the GPU resources to make other pretty things.

Personally, I love SSAA anti-aliasing, however the costs of me using it when I'm already running games at 7680x1440 is stupidly massive, can only use it with fairly old games, consoles have no hope in using it. :(

Shin'en did state on twitter a few weeks ago that they "don't see any problems" with using SMAA on Wii U.

There wouldn't be.
Pretty much *any* modern shader based GPU can use it.
You *could* in theory run it on the very first Xbox via it's Shader Model 1.0/1.1 hardware with a few loop backs to get around the limited shader lengths.

Otherwise, throw it on the CPU, the WiiU isn't *that* underpowered it can't run simple screen filter based anti-aliasing methods. :P

more footage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwKuvJPv5eU