PC Graphics Settings Explained: Texture Quality, Anti-Aliasing, V-Sync

Areej Syed
Nov 1 · 4 min read

Modern PC games include a vast array of graphics options that can be tweaked to establish a good balance between visual fidelity and performance. However, more often than not the developers don’t provide any explanation of what each graphics setting does. In this post, we’ll break down the various technologies used in games to make them look all fancy and realistic.

Anti-Aliasing

Let’s start off with anti-aliasing. It’s one of the most widely used effects in games. You’ve got the traditional MSAA, SSAA, FXAA and shader based SMAA and TAA that have become the norm. So, what do these AA techniques do? In short, they give the image a cleaner look by removing the jagged edges around objects.

Here’s an example of how FXAA (fast approximate anti-aliasing) improves the image quality by reducing the jaggies. Notice how the top of the shutter (on the left) has rough edges without AA but becomes smoother once FXAA kicks in. Here’s an interactive comparison of how AA improves the picture quality. Here you can see SMAA in action:

The differences are subtle, but in the end, make a notable impact on the image quality. Look at the white machine thingy on the right. It benefits the most from SMAA. Other than that, the gun also gets some minor uplifts in quality.

There are two main categories of anti-aliasing techniques:

Sampling-based: These mainly include MSAA (Multi-Sampling AA) and SSAA (Super Sampling AA) which were popular last-gen and for good reason. They produce the best image quality (broadly speaking) but the performance hit is severe. They work by rendering the image at a higher resolution and then scaling it down to fit the native resolution. This essentially made the entire image more detailed and sharper, making the rough edges smaller in the process but not removing them entirely. Here’s an example.

Shader based: Shader based AA techniques are more efficient and don’t impact the performance by much. They work by applying a slight blur to the edges, making the image smoother but at the same time reducing the sharpness. FXAA is a good example of how shader based AA gets rid of aliasing but at the same time reduces the level of detail by blurring the edges. Here’s an example.

Newer methods such as SMAA greatly reduces the blur intensity while also eating up most of the jaggies. However, it suffers from the same drawback as MSAA: It doesn’t work with transparent textures.

The latest and most popular form of AA is temporal AA which focuses to remove the shimmering effect. It’s most evident in motion. Temporal aliasing is caused when the frame rate is too low compared to the transition speed of the objects in the scene. This makes the boundaries of the objects to appear in motion (shimmer) and that’s referred to as temporal aliasing. Here’s a comparison of TAA vs no AA:

and here’s how TAA and FXAA differ:

https://youtu.be/Za3LVngfNxU

The main advantages of TAA over FXAA are more pronounced in motion. The “teeth” at the boundaries of the objects appear to be moving when you are in motion in-game. TAA works to smoothen these artifacts while FXAA simply applies a “Vaseline filer” which although effective produces curvy lines that jump around when there’s a transition in the scene.

Ambient Occlusion: Continue reading…

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