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. There is no single 'best' — on a high-resolution screen you need less of it at all, because the pixels are already tiny — and the cost ranges from nearly free (FXAA) to noticeable (MSAA / DLAA). If a game looks soft, try a sharper method or a touch of sharpening; if it looks jagged, step the AA up.
The Compy Blackbook holds 174 graded entries like this one, judged against your hardware — and every change it does make is reversible, with the receipt to prove it.
See Compy →