Thank you for the excellent writeup, terrific work!

> Whole communities rally around fixing this, like the reddit communities “r/MotionClarity” or the lovingly titled “r/FuckTAA”, all with the understanding, that Anti-Aliasing should not come at the cost of clarity. FXAA creator Timothy Lottes mentioned, that this is solvable to some degree with adjustments to filtering, though even the most modern titles suffer from this.

I certainly agree that the current trend of relying on upscalers has gone too far and results in blurry and artifact riddled AAA game experiences for many. But after seeing this [1] deep dive by Digital foundry I find the arguments he makes quite compelling. There is a level of motion stability and clarity only tech like DLSS can achieve, even outperforming SSAA. So I've shifted my stance from TAA == blurry, TAA + ML when used right == best AA possible currently for 3D games.

Thoughts?

[1] https://youtu.be/WG8w9Yg5B3g

Google Maps uses AAA on capsule shapes for all road segments - I wrote it ~10 years ago. :D

Fantastic article! I've been trying to figure out antialiasing for MSDF fonts, and have run across some claims:

1. antialiasing should be done in linear rgb space instead of srgb space [1] [2]

2. because of the lack of (1) for decades, fonts have been tweaked to compensate, so sometimes srgb is better [3] [4]

Do you have advice on linear vs srgb space antialiasing?

[1] https://www.puredevsoftware.com/blog/2019/01/22/sub-pixel-ga...

[2] http://hikogui.org/2022/10/24/the-trouble-with-anti-aliasing...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12023985

[4] http://hikogui.org/2022/10/24/the-trouble-with-anti-aliasing...

Great post! Minor nitpick: WebGL does support MSAA since WebGL1, but in WebGL1 only on the canvas, and you don't have any control over the number of samples (can only select antialiasing on/off) - not that it matters much anymore :)

What WebGL2 is still missing is MSAA texture objects (it only supports MSAA render buffers), which makes it impossible to directly load individual samples in a shader (useful for custom-resolve render passes). That's only possible in WebGPU.

How long did this take to write?

I have done a few live visualization based blog posts, and they take me ages to do. I kind of think that's the right idea though. There is so much content out there, taking longer to produce less content at a higher quality benefits everyone.

One small bit of tecnical feedback for the website itself: it would be nice if the links in the article open in a new tab by default, because reloading the webpage via the back button is a little broken on my mobile browsers. I suspect it has something to do with trying to restore the state of the page while also having WebGL contexts.

As a non-gamedev person but just gamer, I should expect that this will replace TAA anytime soon? Should it replace TAA?

Great write up, excellent explorables. I skimmed some parts so forgive me if this was covered, but I wonder what happens with overlapping shapes in this approach. For example, a white background with a black disc and then a white disc of the exact same size and position would probably leave a fuzzy gray hairline circle? With regular antialiasing it should be all white.

Not a question but some unsolicited (sorry) feedback. The intro seems designed to set people up for disappointment. You start off by talking about AA methods used for 3D scenes, and you've picked a very cool way to present them... but the article is actually about antialiased drawing of SDFs, which is not exactly a hard problem and not applicable to 3D scenes. Unless your scene is made up of SDF shapes, but I don't think the method you're presenting would be fast enough on a nontrivial scene as you would need to rely on alpha-blending across seams. (I think Alex Evans' talk on Dreams mentions they tried something similar to get fuzzy shapes but dropped it due to perf and sorting issues.) In any case, it would have been nice for the article's intro to more clearly say what it's about and what the technique is useful for.

Massive thanks for this! I’m already using my own version of analytical antialiasing but there were some bits I couldn’t get quite right so this is perfect!

Can you elaborate a bit on the tech-stack used for this blog? I didn't find any hints in the source (but I'm not an expert). Is it some known framework? What does the input look like (Markdown etc).?

I would love to connect on some ideas around using antialiasing as a way to extend inference in extracting information from computer vision outputs.

> Mobile chips support exactly MSAAx4 [...] the driver will force 4x anyways

On what GPUs and through what APIs did you see this? This seems fairly weird. I especially wouldn't expect Apple to have problems.

What an absolutely fantastic read.