Anti-aliasing
For people that hate pixels
For people that hate pixels
Anti-aliasing (AA) aims to lower the amount of jagged and pixelated edges in the game. Aliasing occurs when continuous objects such as a line are displayed on a screen made up of a finite number of pixels. Instead of a smooth line one gets one with a stair-like patten. AA solves this by smoothing out the line by filling in the surrounding pixels. It makes it harder to notice the pixelated edges but also reduces contrast and makes the image more blurry.
Hardware
Techniques that demand or use some form of hardware for AA.
CSAA - Coverage-Sampled Anti-Aliasing - 2006 / EQAA - Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing - 2010
Variations of MSAA from Nvidia and AMD. It adds coverage samples to better detect if a primitive touch a pixel.
MSAA - Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing - 1999
Each pixel contain N subsample points. If a primitive touch any subsample point it will run the pixel shader. The result is then stored in each of the subsample the primitive was touching. So the z-buffer and the render target need to store N data per pixel. The final step is the resolve step that downsample all the data back to a single pixel. The simplest way is to average all subsamples in a pixel.
A Quick Overview of MSAA - 2012
SSAA - Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing
The image is rendered into a frame buffer at a higher resolution then the one being displayed. The image is then down sampled to the desired display resolution.
Post-processing
Techniques that post-process the image. For people that enjoy writing shaders.
ATAA - Adaptive Temporal Antialiasing - 2018
TXAA - Temporal Anti-Aliasing - 2012
SMAA - Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing - 2011
FXAA - Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing- 2011
Implementing FXAA - 2016
FXAA - 2011
FXAA 3.11 in 15 Slides - 2011
DLAA - Directionally Localized Anti Aliasing - 2011
MLAA - Morphological Anti-Aliasing - 2009
G-Buffer
Techniques used with deferred rendering and use a geometry buffer to work.
AGAA - Aggregate G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing - 2015
GBAA - Geometry Buffer Antialiasing - 2011
Reference
Aliasing in computer graphics - 2020
Research impact retrospective: MLAA from 2009 to 2017 - 2017
Anti-aliased Alpha Test: The Esoteric Alpha To Coverage - 2017
Road to Anti-Aliasing in BRE: Aliasing and Anti-Aliasing - 2016
A Temporal stable Distance to Edge Anti-Aliasing Technique for GCN architecture - 2015
Diving into Anti-Aliasing - 2014
Applying Sampling Theory To Real-Time Graphics - 2012
Anti-Aliasing Methods in CryENGINE 3 - 2011
Digital Foundry: The Future of Anti-Aliasing - 2011
Filtering Approaches for Real-Time Anti-Aliasing - 2011
So Many AA Techniques, So Little Time - 2011
Toms hardware: Anti-Aliasing Analysis - 2011
Recipe for antialiasing as a post - 2011
Step by step recipe for Temporal Anti-Aliasing
A Failed Adventure in Avoiding Temporal Anti-Aliasing
Temporal AA and the quest for the Holy Trail