What's Multi Sampling Aliasing?

Multi-Sampled Anti-Aliasing (MSAA).
This is what you typically have in hardware on a modern graphics card. The graphics card renders to a surface that is larger than the final image, but in shading each "cluster" of samples (that will end up in a single pixel on the final screen) the pixel shader is run only once.

What does Multi Sample Anti Aliasing?

Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) is a low-cost approach for improving the quality of rendering by reducing the impact of jaggies along the edges of primitives. Jaggies are the result of aliasing due to pixel sampling of geometry. ... MSAA then reduces these samples to a single value per pixel once the render is completed.

How does multi sample work?

In essence, multisampling is supersampling where the sample rate of the fragment shader (and all of its attendant operations) is lower than the number of samples per pixel. ... This means that, unless the fragment shader replaces the fragment's depth value, the depth value for different samples will have different values.

Robert Thorne

Robert Thorne

Automotive & Future Transportation Editor

Robert Thorne covers electric vehicle innovations, autonomous driving systems, global mobility trends, and automotive engineering developments.