What is the difference between AA an MSAA

[robbiep28]

Which one gives better quality.

 

[benski]

AA does technically. MSAA is an optimization of AA so that it's less demanding on hardware, but you would likely never notice a difference unless at extremely low resolution.

Check this out if you're interested in the technical details: http://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/multisampling_anti-aliasing/index8_e.php

 

[xtreme5]

basically when you're playing a game with no AA the image will look bushy and blury. As you can see a complete figure in this link..
www.kotaku.com.au/2011/12/what-is-fxaa/

 

[bystander]

AA is a generic term for Anti-aliasing. MSAA is a specific technique to apply AA. MSAA stands for Multi-Sampling Anti-aliasing. SSAA is supersampling AA, ML is molphalogical AA. There are others I don't know their meaning, such as FXAA, CSAA and so on. Every one of those are all AA or antialiasing, just different methods.

 

[bystander]

AA does technically. MSAA is an optimization of AA so that it's less demanding on hardware, but you would likely never notice a difference unless at extremely low resolution.

Check this out if you're interested in the technical details: http://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/multisampling_anti-aliasing/index8_e.php

The article is interesting, but I have one major beef with it. The very first paragraph:

Generally multisampling anti-aliasing (with AF activated) is superior to supersampling, because better quality is achieved at the same performance, or, respectively, comparable quality at higher performance. At least as long as resolution can be increased. A higher resolution has smoother edges and more detailed textures. Thus our primary goal is to have smooth, high resolution edges. When anti-aliasing is switched off, even on 1600x1200 the jaggies are too annoying for true quality nuts.

Perhaps, with the techniques used in 2003, that statement was closer to being true, but in today's world, SSAA is far and away superior, because SSAA will smooth out texture jaggies, which MSAA ignores. That said, SSAA is generally too taxing to use. Foilage and in some games clothing jaggies are very noticeably better with SSAA (look at DA:Origins and DA2 for clothing jaggies for example and how SSAA fixes them, and just about any landscape with a bunch of weeds).

 

[ilysaml]

Perhaps, with the techniques used in 2003, that statement was closer to being true, but in today's world, SSAA is far and away superior, because SSAA will smooth out texture jaggies, which MSAA ignores. That said, SSAA is generally too taxing to use.

How did you enable SSAA? I enabled it via CCC and took several screenshots to try to notice a difference between it and the MSAA & AMSAA and I couldn't find. Also, my FPS decreased from 58 to 38 using SSAA.
Can you get a screenshot tells the difference? Because it works well in one game and basic failure in 10.
Found out that forcing settings through AMD's CCC is to useless, maybe it will work well in specific situations.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon,2868-7.html

 

[bystander]

How did you enable SSAA? I enabled it via CCC and took several screenshots to try to notice a difference between it and the MSAA & AMSAA and I couldn't find. Also, my FPS decreased from 58 to 38 using SSAA.
Can you get a screenshot tells the difference? Because it works well in one game and basic failure in 10.
Found out that forcing settings through AMD's CCC is to useless, maybe it will work well in specific situations.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon,2868-7.html

That's the rub, SSAA generally will not work in anything but DX9, so it is not a practical AA method, but in games it will work in, it works incredibly well. Dragon Age: Origins is probably the best example. Risen also used to work well with it until a patch screwed it up causing textures to vanish. I understand that Crysis, in DX9 will also fix all the flickering jaggies in the trees.