I was reading about someone having trouble with Galaxy due to msaa being turned on and I realized that I have no idea what anti-alising technologies are available (I'm way back in the msaa days). I don't tend to mess with settings much. I usually use a default setting. But after looking at images with different antialiasing settings, I realized that it's better learn some of this stuff. Some images were dramatically better with some of these newfangled technologies.

So I looked up msaa and fxaa and csaa. Msaa is multi-sampling antialiasing. It renders multiple images per pixel and averages them out. It takes a ton of computational time but looks the best.

Fxaa is fast approximate anti aliasing. It does some edge detection and averages out some pixels on the edge. It looks very similar to msaa but uses a lot less computations, which gives you better frame rates.

Csaa uses the computational power of msaa with four passes but gives results that are visually similar to msaa x16. I read Nvidia's description of how it works but it made little sense to me. In the end, they are using surfaces to get things done differently and more efficiently.

What else is out there? What settings do you use? Do the new gtx 10 cards have some new types? I have a GTX 650Ti and my son uses 660 but after seeing the light tracing demoes I may get in line for a gtx11 card.

MSAA is certainly not the best. It helps mainly with triangle edges but the internals may be left with aliasing. For the same reason, it doesn't work well with sprites.

I like SSAA for its simplicity, but due to performance it's not really an option except for old games or ones that you run at a very low resolution.

This should be all you need. Sorry but GOG's forum doesn't parse the url for a proper link.

[url=https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Anti-aliasing_(AA)]This[/url])

Perhaps Orbmu2k's
nVidia Profile Inspector may give you some clues about AA methods hidden in drivers.

edit:
link changed to more reliable one..

That was great! Thank you! I'll have to see if I have smaa available in some of my games. It looks quite nice for a postprocessing technique.

Smearing Vaseline on your screen is better than FXAA. CSAA is probably about the best bang for your buck depending on your GPU.

I'll have to try that with my integrated card laptop.

hope you dont try to get warranty support afterwards :D

Glad I could help.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but at the very bottom there's a collapsed section: "Forcing Anti-Aliasing".

If you expand it, you should see several programs that inject SMAA. That means that the developers of the game, you're interested in, didn't necessarily had to have implemented that AA method for you to use it. You can just apply it externally to any game (???most games??? not sure about this).

Seems like SuperSampling would be the easiest and fastest of them all... Assuming i have the right one in mind.

In games that had MLAA and FXAA I can see FXAA is better, but honestly none of them please me much since I grew up on real MSAA. So few games have real MSAA now though, which is a shame. Was amazed to see GTA5 had it, though my setup isn't good enough to use it and keep 60fps with high settings, so ended up with FXAA anyway.

I'll give it a try.