CodingHorror isn’t typically a website to visit for visualization advice, but a new post over there details the many types of anti-aliasing algorithms, complete with lots of detail and examples and the original paper for the FXAA algorithm.
Pretty much all “modern” anti-aliasing is some variant of the MSAA hack, and even that costs a quarter of your framerate. That’s prohibitively expensive, unless you have so much performance you don’t even care, which will rarely be true for any recent game. While the crawling lines of aliasing do bother me, I don’t feel anti-aliasing alone is worth giving up a quarter of my framerate and/or turning down other details to pay for it.
But that was before I learned that there are some emerging alternatives to MSAA. And then, much to my surprise, these alternatives started showing up as actual graphics options in this season’s PC games — Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City, and so on. What is this FXAA thing, and how does it work?
