Anti-aliasing

[Aunty Em]

What exactly is anti-aliasing? I know its to do with Open GL on the video card but that's as far as my knowledge extends.

Do I need to use it and if so when?

 

[HeXp£Øi±]

Anti-aliasing is a technique for smoothing out jagged edges in a graphic

It's trickery i tell ya!

 

[Aunty Em]

So which one is anti-aliased? Left or right?

 

[HeXp£Øi±]

Right. Blur your eyes or step aways back from the monitor and you can see they look smoother.

 

[Aunty Em]

Right. Blur your eyes or step aways back from the monitor and you can see they look smoother.

Yep I got that. I presume it's used in fast action games?

 

[HeXp£Øi±]

Pretty much all games use it now. But yes it's a very important form of graphics manipulation.

 

[Luis G]

Anti-aliasing is widely used, even windows use it to smooth the mouse pointer, and you have the option to enable it for fonts.

Also, when you select to "smooth" images in a program like photoshop, it will apply an anti-aliasing process in the borders of the images, borders are the zones that present high-contrasting pixels.

 

[fury]

Windows doesn't anti-alias the mouse pointer, but it does anti-alias big fonts (the font smoothing option in Win2k and below), and XP can additionally anti-alias all fonts, big and small (the "ClearType" option)

 

[Aunty Em]

Thank you all very much for the information.