What options I should give users related to anti-aliasing

Hello there,
There are several options related to anti-aliasing in the URP. Which options I should give users related to anti-aliasing?

  • FXAA or SMAA or none. I am adding this option.
  • If I choose SMAA from the camera, there is another option, Quality - Should I show this option to the user? Or just choose it myself? Low, medium or high?
  • In the URP asset there is option to set MSAA quality 2x, 4x or 8x. Should I show it to the user?

Should I enable SMAA and MSAA both?
Is MSAA for 3D games?

Hey, MSAA is a hardware AA, so (sometimes) you can combine it with FXAA or SMAA to have better anti-aliasing. (excluding URP14 TAA)

If you don’t think that users will understand their differences, you can provide some presets like “low”, “medium” and “high”.

I remember that the (performance) difference is that “Low SMAA” needs 1 pass while “High SMAA” needs 3.

I suggest using the lowest one (+ other AA) that produces satisfying results.

By the way, the quality of FXAA has improved a lot in 2022.2 (URP 14) and I will strongly recommend you to try it if your project is using URP 14.

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Thank you so much. I have one more question. Is MSAA only for 3D games, as I read somewhere. I am working on a 2D game.

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MSAA can do anti-aliasing on these situations:

If you are using a texture to cutout some pixels in the shader (ATC enabled), then MSAA will do AA for those “holes”.

Added: Starts from URP 14, URP default shaders and Shader Graphs will automatically support Alpha-To-Coverage. If you want to add it for your custom shader, you can refer to the Lit shader.

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Hi, I noticed an improvement was noted about FXAA quality in the 2023.1 alpha notes, are you sure this has been backported to 2022.2 ?

Oops, I’ve checked it again and sadly it’s not.

The PR only changed 2 files (+1 license), so hopefully Unity will consider backporting this to 2022.2 soon.