What is Anti-Aliasing MSAA vs Fxaa?
Mia Phillips
Updated on February 27, 2026
Pretty much all “modern” anti-aliasing is some variant of the MSAA hack, and even that costs a quarter of your framerate. FXAA stands for Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing, and it’s an even more clever hack than MSAA, because it ignores polygons and line edges, and simply analyses the pixels on the screen.
Is Fxaa better for performance?
It depends on your GPU, your preference, and what kind of performance you’re after. If framerate is an issue, however, the choice is usually obvious: FXAA is very efficient. If you’ve got an RTX card, and the game you’re playing supports it, give DLSS a try—you paid for it, and it’s top of the line.
Does anti-aliasing affect performance?
There are two main groups of anti-aliasing. Since this version of AA is post-processing, there’s only a tiny impact on your performance, but the image quality improvement is also less noticeable and can appear too blurry, especially with fast motion.
What are the different types of anti-aliasing?
If you are a regular gamer, you might have heard of anti-aliasing terms like TAA, FXAA, MSAA, and much more tossed around frequently.
Is FXAA the best anti-aliasing?
Actually FXAA is the lowest tier of Antialiasing for Quality and isnt even the best performing. Shut it monkey. Youre not superior to anyone because you know what a goddam acronym stands for.
What is the difference between the depth buffer and anti-aliasing?
Besides running the shader at 1x and the framebuffer at 4x, the GPU’s rasteriser is run at 16x. So while the depth buffer produces better anti-aliasing, the intermediate shades of blending produced are even better. Pretty much all “modern” anti-aliasing is some variant of the MSAA hack, and even that costs a quarter of your framerate.
What is the best anti aliasing for gaming?
Ive discussed it in forums and the general consensus among most pc gamers is msaa. fxaa is generally a good option for those whose systems cant handle full on MSAA and supersampling. Actually FXAA is the lowest tier of Antialiasing for Quality and isnt even the best performing. Shut it monkey.