ABSTRACT
There are many sources of aliasing in rendered images. The two most common culprits are geometric edges and shading. Historically these sources of aliasing have been resolved by Multi-Sample Antialiasing (MSAA) and mip-mapping with trilinear filtering respectively. With mip-mapping and trilinear filtering, which were supported on consumer-level hardware even way back in the 1990s, textures on surfaces were essentially free from aliasing. In the early 2000s, as consumerlevel hardware gained MSAA support, the remaining problem of edge aliasing, often referred to as “jaggies,” was more or less a solved problem. Games of this era could then be relatively aliasing free since the geometric detail was limited enough that MSAA effectively eliminated all geometric aliasing, and shading was typically simple and low frequency and did not introduce any additional aliasing on top of the surface texture. The main exception was alpha-tested objects, such as fences and foliage, which sorely stood out in an otherwise relatively aliasingfree environment.
