Anti-Aliasing makes my game look blurry and laggy? Why?

[Chemeng Lee]

I'm using AA, its not improving my image quality. The only thing its doing is that its making my game images look soft and blurry. Anyone know why? I'm running AA on Maxed settings.

 

[MADD617]

Not sure why it's "soft" or blurry, but maybe you're just getting fairly low frame rates with AA then what you're used to?

 

[Sig2525]

slow frame rate due to the AA eating most of your gpu resources, even high end gpu are getting worked up when anti aliasing is cranked up. it will look blurry due to the slow motion effect of your slow frame rate. what aa does is smoothen the graphics on you game.

 

[bystander]

There are many different types of AA. In every case, there is some smoothing/blurring that takes place, but some are worse than others. MSAA typically does the least blurring, as it is very targeted, fixing only the outer edges of objects. Most post process AA methods cause the most blur, as they try to smooth everything on the entire image, and does not get any assistance on knowing what to target from the game engine. FXAA, SMAA, MLAA and TXAA are the worse in this regard. SSAA even does some blurring on the entire image, and it is extremely taxing to the frame rate.

Learning which AA methods tend to lead to your more preferred result would be helpful. Until then, I advise sticking with MSAA x4/2. Do not go higher, as it tends to be a waste of resources.

 

[wondra2]

I'm using AA, its not improving my image quality. The only thing its doing is that its making my game images look soft and blurry. Anyone know why? I'm running AA on Maxed settings.

Because that is exactly what AA is supposed to do! There are different algorithms for AA, but they all have two things in common: 1. they soften edges 2. they do it by looking "what if I had more pixels here", averaging the result ...and computing extra pixels naturally costs performance.
Your personal preference that "it does not improve anything" does not change much - if you dont like it, just turn it off.