Anti-Aliasing

Anti-Aliasing is where the 3D card takes a look at what has been rendered and blurs the edges of the polygons to get rid of jagged pixel edges.

There are 2 ways for the 3D card to generate anti-aliasing images. The first approach is at the individual polygon level, which requires you to render the polygon from back to front of the view, so that each polygon can blend with what’s behind it. The second approach is where you scale the whole frame to a much larger resolution than it will be displayed at, then when you scale the image down the sharp edges tend to be blended away in the scaling.

 The good thing about the first approach is that it is very high quality, the bad thing about this method is that of you render out of order you will end up with some sort of strange effects. The good thing about the second second approach is that it is alot easier to use but you need alot of memory bandwidth and a large memory footprint.