In case you are a gamer and you have experienced lots of different games with different settings for their graphics and gameplay, you might hear of anti-aliasing. When you are running a weak system or an old graphic card that removes the details of a game and provides pixelated graphics, then you might be able to see those blocky, pixelated edges in your games.
These pixelated edges or blocks are referred to as “jaggies.” Jaggies are not easy to remove if you don’t have a high-resolution setup. In case you have a good resolution available, you try to eliminate it by increasing the screen resolution. The Anti-aliasing works to eliminate the jaggies and improve the display of your game.
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Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing helps to eliminate jaggies that appear in objects in any computer game. Multiple anti-aliasing methods are used to eliminate those jaggies. Most PC games have their own graphic settings where users can make the settings for anti-aliasing after you launch the game. This helps to provide a smoother and better graphics screen.
When a user starts to run a game on higher resolution, it most likely helps to remove the jaggies with pixelated effect or blocky shape curves. The display is improved with the high processing power in case you have a good graphics card. It can support anti-aliasing to remove jaggies and make the corners much better and smoothly visible.
Do remembers that anti-aliasing can cause your computer to slow down as your hardware performance might get affected when the computer is focusing on anti-aliasing affect most of the time. If your computer doesn’t have enough resolution to eliminate jaggies, anti-aliasing provides the solution in that case.
Types of Anti-Aliasing Methods
There are two anti-aliasing methods, and the goal of each of them is to provide a sharp and clear image by removing jaggies. Both of them work in different ways. Here’s how.
Spatial Anti-Aliasing
Here’s the method how spatial anti-aliasing works:
- Consider you have the images on your screen that is of lower resolution, and it contains a lot of jaggies.
- The anti-aliasing works to render the images at a higher resolution.
- After rendering at a high resolution, different color samples are taken from the pixels.
- Then the image with high resolution is shrunk down back to its original form, which makes each of the pixels receive a new color that provides a little output than a sampled pixel.
The process helps ta low-resolution image to get the right color accuracy from a high-resolution image. This helps to blend the pixels together and removes the jaggies in the result.
Post-Process Anti-aliasing
This is the other type of anti-aliasing, in which each of the pixels is blurred slightly after the rendering process. The GPU of a computer determines where the edge of a polygon lies after comparing the color contrast between the pixels. The pixels that are similar indicate that they belong to the same polygon.
Blurring the pixels is an effective method because it greatly helps to remove the stark that lies between any unusual aligned pixels that are causing the jaggies on your screen. This can sometimes lead to a very blurry image which is a downside of this method. It is not good for games that have high textures and details. But still, it is a fast and less power using option than the other one.
Conclusion
This was a discussion about Anti-aliasing and what anti-aliasing is in games. We discussed how different anti-aliasing could cause the difference in the appearance of images and pixels that appear on your screen.
FAQ’s
Q#1: Should I turn anti-aliasing off or on?
Ans: If you have good graphics and great visuals in your game with a high-resolution display, then you don’t have to turn on anti-aliasing. It is a feature that is only suitable for conditions where some users experience jaggies in their display. This feature smoothes out the edges and makes a better and clear image for you.
Q#2: Is anti-aliasing good for FPS?
Ans: If you are using anti-aliasing, it might not be good for your FPS. It can put some load on your GPU, which will have an effect on its performance.
