Anti-aliasing (AA)
Also searched as: anti-aliasing · antialiasing · aa settings · taa · msaa · dlaa · fxaa · jagged edges
What it means
Anti-aliasing smooths the jagged 'staircase' edges on objects in a game. Different methods trade sharpness, smoothness, and frame cost differently.
More detail
Edges look jagged because the screen is a grid of square pixels trying to draw a smooth diagonal, and anti-aliasing blends those steps away. The common types are worth knowing: TAA (temporal) is cheap and very smooth but can look a little soft or smeary in motion; FXAA is the cheapest but blurriest; MSAA is sharp but expensive and rare in modern games; and DLAA (NVIDIA) uses the same AI as DLSS to anti-alias at full resolution for the best quality at a real frame cost. …
In the Blackbook
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