Anti-Aliasing-Methods

FXAA - Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing

To be added

MLAA - Morphological Anti-Aliasing

To be added

MSAA - Multisample Anti-Aliasing

This method of antialiasing calculates a picture with a higher resolution than you are using ingame, by representing each output pixel with multiple samples (also known as sub-pixels). The sub-pixels are all the same for a given polygon, i.e. it only calculates once, however where they reach the polygon edges, different sub-pixels will be covered by different polygons, and this is where MSAA gets it’s advantage, because edges are where problems are generally noticed. The final output pixel is a combination of the values from each of the pixels, for example in MSAA4x four sub-pixels will be calculated and the mean of these four values will be set as the pixel value on the screen. Using MSAA reduces the visibility of jagged edges on diagonal lines. In the picture you can see this at the roof-structure of the tribune. In comparison to the other antialiasing methods currently available in pCARS, this is the only method which gets it’s advantage by a finer sampling of the 3D-scene. The other methods apply image-processing on the rendered picture, based on edge detection. MSAA can be combined with other methods which apply to the final image, although this doesn’t always work very well because the edges are harder for the other systems to detect, having already been blurred by the MSAA. MSAA is expensive because it needs more memory to hold the additional sub-pixels, and needs additional memory bandwidth to write to more pixels, however by re-using one pixel calculation between all sub-pixels for much of the scene, and avoiding the cost of analysing and post-processing the scene, it is not as expensive as you might expect.

SMAA - Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing

To be added