What Does Anti-Aliasing Actually Do To Your PC Games?
Anti-aliasing makes jagged game graphics look smoother, but some methods hit your GPU much harder than others.
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It used to be a flex to get a gaming machine and turn anti-aliasing to the max. If you could get 4x or 8x MSAA without making your game look like a slideshow, you were doing pretty well. These days, that basic graphics option has morphed into an alphabet soup of FXAA, SMAA, TAA, DLAA and other combinations that sound like someone dropped a bag of Scrabble tiles.
Fortunately, they all tackle a similar issue. Games have to represent curved and diagonal edges on a grid of square pixels, which can result in stair-step patterns called "jaggies." Anti-aliasing smooths those rough edges, but there are several ways to do it.
Some ask your GPU to compute additional samples. Others filter the image after it's been rendered, while newer temporal techniques...
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