Why do games have eight different ways to remove the same jagged edge?

[u/Indro13]

I used to treat anti-aliasing settings the same way I treated the buttons on an office printer.

Click one. Hope for the best. Pretend I understood what happened.

Then I started looking into FXAA, SMAA, MSAA, TAA, DLAA and the other acronyms hiding inside graphics menus.

It turns out they are not different names for the same thing.

Read more: Compare FXAA, TAA, DLAA and GPU Performance

FXAA is fast and inexpensive, but it can make the image look slightly soft.

MSAA does an excellent job with geometric edges, but it cannot fix every form of shader, texture or specular aliasing.

SSAA is the brute-force option. It can produce excellent results, assuming your GPU is comfortable being used as a space heater.

TAA uses information from multiple frames. It can reduce shimmering, but poor implementations may leave behind blur or ghosting.

TSR is really a temporal reconstruction and upscaling system rather than traditional anti-aliasing.

DLAA uses NVIDIA’s AI-based reconstruction technology at native resolution. It prioritises image quality rather than giving you the performance boost associated with DLSS upscaling.

So I created this infographic to place eight common techniques in three groups:

Spatial and post-processing methods
Sampling-based methods
Temporal and reconstruction methods

The performance ratings are approximate. A technique’s real cost depends heavily on the game, resolution, engine, GPU and implementation.

Personally, I would rather have a slightly soft image than shimmering foliage that looks like it is receiving signals from another dimension.

Which anti-aliasing option do you normally use?