Which Anti-aliasing is the sharpest?

[Rallehop]

Title :)

[Stollie]

SSAA, or Super-Sample Anti-Aliasing is a brute force method of anti-aliasing. It results in the best image quality but comes at a tremendous resource cost. SSAA works by rendering the scene at a higher resolution, 2x SSAA renders the scene at twice the resolution along each axis (4x the pixel count), 4x SSAA renders the scene at four times the resolution along each axis (16x the pixel) count, and 8x SSAA renders the scene at eight times the resolution along each axis (64x the pixel count). The final image is produced by downsampling the massive source image using an averaging filter. This acts as a low pass filter which removes the high frequency components that caused the jaggedness.

MSAA, or Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing is an optimization of SSAA that reduces the amount of pixel shader evaluations that need to be computed by focusing on overlapping regions of the scene. The result is antialiasing along edges that is on par with SSAA and less anti-aliasing along surfaces as these make up the bulk of SSAA computations. MSAA is substantially less computationally expensive than SSAA and results in comparable image quality.

FXAA, or Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing is an Anti-Aliasing technique that is performed entirely in post processing. FXAA operates on the rasterized image rather than the scene geometry. As a consequence, forcing FXAA or using FXAA incorrectly can result in the FXAA filter smoothing out parts of the visual overlay that are usually kept sharp for reasons of clarity as well as smoothing out textures. FXAA is inferior to MSAA but is almost free computationally and is thus desirable on low end platforms.

[Stollie]

So basically pick your poison :D

High end rig - SSAA
Medium end - MSAA
Low end - FXAA

[lPaladinl]

Personally I prefer FXAA over MSAA in most cases even though I can run MSAA maxed out just fine in most games. FXAA tends to look clearer, MSAA tends to look more smeared to me.

SSAA is the best option but good luck with that depending on your GPU and resolution. If you're trying to run 4K usually you shouldn't be using SSAA.

[CaptainRAVE]

Originally posted by Stollie:

So basically pick your poison :D

High end rig - SSAA
Medium end - MSAA
Low end - FXAA

This, personally I find FXAA reduces the overall images clarity. I am managing SSAA at 1440p on a 1080TI and 9700K just fine.

[Artean]

You can also try to inject SMAA through Nvidia Freestyle filters or Reshade. Upside - it blurs the image less than Egosofts FXAA; downside - it seem to blur the GUI and fonts.

[Pathogenic]

Originally posted by CaptainRAVE:

Originally posted by Stollie:

So basically pick your poison :D

High end rig - SSAA
Medium end - MSAA
Low end - FXAA

This, personally I find FXAA reduces the overall images clarity. I am managing SSAA at 1440p on a 1080TI and 9700K just fine.

I end up using MSAA with a GTX 1060. SSAA ended up having too big of a performance impact for me.