What is Anti-aliasing?
Some of my friends have heard me yammering about this term and think I have completely lost it. “AA” for short, anti-aliasing is that setting ingame that enhances 3d images by smoothing out “jaggies” that you see commonly in games. They are frequently seen distorting diagonal objects like stair railings, wires, cables, curved surfaces — basically anything that isn’t perpendicular relative to the sides of your screens.
I won’t explain the intricacies of pixels, 3D rendering, etc as this part of the blog deals with "PC Tweaks/Tutorials from a NOOB’S Field of View”. So, suffice to say, computers have a hard time “drawing” smooth curves or lines that are not perpendicular to the sides of your screen. To clarify things:
Ha. Ha.
You can force it to, and this is where anti-aliasing comes in. The settings are available in multiples of two (2x, 4x, 8xs, 16x, etc) with higher numbers translating to better “smoothing out those danged jaggies”.
And danged they are.
They are not just there to ruin your suspension of disbelief, you run, and the diagonal sides of your gun move. Hell, it’s not just what you are holding; they are there hugging every last piece of diagonal line and curve in the game world you can see. It’s like an invasion of mini-Agent Smiths. They are everywhere. And they move when you move, stop when you stop; it’s like a horror movie too.
“Dang, hombre, I swore I saw something move in the corner of my eye!”
At their most prominent, they look like mini-escalators that are moving everywhere – they TOTALLY ruin your immersive experience. Overhead phone lines with moving serrated edges anyone?
Here’s a real world application of my rant. Click on each image below to enlarge them and compare: (take notice of the lines in the landing of the stairs)
Without anti-aliasing
With anti-aliasing
Hmm. “Real world application” — I think I just created an oxymoron.
Alright if you didn’t spot the difference, you are luckier than the rest of us; you can live out the rest of your life content with just a GeForce MX card and Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 with 16X or more AA be hanged.
Really, it’s bliss; why live in torment? =)____)
