Antialiasing

The Antialiasing Image Effect offers a set of algorithms designed to prevent aliasing and give a smoother appearance to graphics. Aliasing is an effect where lines appear jagged or have a “staircase” appearance (as displayed in the left-hand image below). This can happen if the graphics output device does not have a high enough resolution to display a straight line.

Antialiasing reduces the prominence of these jagged lines by surrounding them with intermediate shades of color. Although this reduces the jagged appearance of the lines, it also makes them blurrier.

The Antialiasing algorithms are image-based. This is very useful for deferred rendering, where traditional multisampling (as used in the Editor’s Quality settings) is not properly supported (for example, when using deferred shading or HDR rendering).

The algorithms currently supported are:

• NVIDIA’s FXAA, FXAA II and FXAA III (tweakable and console optimized)
• NFAA and SSAA (simpler edge blurs that blur only local edges)
• An adaption of the DLAA algorithm that also addresses long edges

SSAA is the fastest technique, followed by NFAA, FXAA II, FXAA III, DLAA and then other FXAA techniques. Typically, the quality of antialiasing trades off against the speed of the algorithm, but there may be situations where the choice of algorithm makes little difference.

For those especially interested in console deployment, the optimized FXAA III implementation offers the best balance between quality and performance, and can be tweaked towards a sharper or blurrier appearance.

As with the other Image Effects, you must install the Standard Assets Effects package to access the Antialiasing Image Effect.

Properties

Hardware Support

This Image Effect requires a graphics card that supports Shader Model 3. See the Graphics Hardware Capabilities and Emulation page for further details and a list of compliant hardware.