Rendering – Anti-Aliasing

What Does Anti-Aliasing Actually Do To Pixels?

When rendering a polygon the graphics card will look at what has already been rendered and then blur  the edges so you dont get jagged pixel edges that would normally be visable.

How Many Ways Are There For A 3D Card To Generate Anti-Aliased Images?

There are two ways for a 3d card to generate anti-aliased images, the first is an approach at the individual polygon level.This requires for you to render polygons back to front of the view, so each polygon can blend with what is behind it.

The second is that you render the whole frame at a much larger resolution that you intend to desplay it, and then when you scale the image down you sharp jagged edges tend to blended with the scaling.

Pro’s And Con’s

When using the first approach if you render out of order you can end up with all sorts of strange effects.

As for the second approach you can get nice results but requires a large amount of memory bandwidth because the card has to render more pixels than are in the resulting frame.