ABSTRACT
In recent years a number of interesting alternatives to multisampling has emerged. In 2009 morphological antialiasing (MLAA) [Reshetov 09] was introduced, starting off a wave of new techniques. The fundamental difference between MLAA and MSAA is that the former is entirely a post-process operation. This means that the algorithm is provided a finished rendered image, which it then analyzes and antialiases. This works by first detecting edges in the image (defined, for instance, by a certain difference in luminance between neighboring pixels) and then classifying those edges into a set of shapes. From these shapes it reconstructs what the original edge might have been and uses that to compute a coverage value used for blending with neighboring pixels. MLAA was initially a CPU-based technique for ray tracers but was later expanded to GPU implementations by others [Jimenez et al. 11]. At the point of this writing, several games have shipped with MLAA in some form as their antialiasing solution. Another very popular technique is fast approximate antialiasing (FXAA) [Lottes 11] that, due to its simple single-pass implementation with optimized targets for all important platforms, is a very convenient alternative.
