Go Extreme With Antialiasing

Forget Fair microtransaction models and the magic formula for a successful esports game— these are but flash-in-the-pan challenges the games industry faces currently. For a much longer time, 3D designers were stumped by a far more prosaic problem: how to draw curved and diagonal lines without them appearing like a blocky staircase of pixels.

For a much longer time, 3D designers were stumped by a far more prosaic problem: how to draw curved and diagonal lines without them appearing like a blocky staircase of pixels.

Aliased polygonal edges—or jaggies, as you say in today’s parlance, with your low-slung jeans and dangerous new ideas—were a simple fact of 3D graphics for over a decade. It was only in the mid-2000s that antialiasing (AA) became sophisticated enough to smooth out those lines until they appeared realistic, and it still takes a lot of computational power to do so.

In this smoother-edged age, though, new problems have emerged. What if the antialiasing options baked into your game aren’t sufficient? And what about playing old games, which offer only perfunctory antialiasing—is that the end of the line for your crusade against the jaggies?

Well, no. There are lots of other options. Here’s how to go beyond the graphics menu’s limitations, and antialias those edges so much that even Tom Jones would deem them smooth. –PHIL IWANIUK

1 GET HOLD OF GEDOSATA

You know what they say—if in doubt, downsample. Don’t worry about who “they” are, just trust us: They’re always saying it. Downsampling is essentially supersampling AA (SSAA) by another name: You render a version of the original image that’s much, much bigger—usually x2, x4 or x8 times the size of your native resolution—then you downsample that enormous image so it fits back within the dimensions of your monitor. And you do this by downloading Generic Downsampling Tool, aka GeDoSaTo.