For the purposes of this article we'll tackle the two most common modes of anti-aliasing available in modern games: supersampling and multisampling. For our tests, we used Crytek's , a graphical tour de force. Our testbed consisted of an Intel Core i7-990X processor, 6GB of RAM, and the graphics card.

With supersampling, your graphics card blends the colors of adjacent pixels by pre-rendering the entire image at a much larger size before each frame (as described above). As an example, let's say you were playing a game at a 1280-by-800 resolution, and checked off "4x supersampling" in your graphics options. Click on the images below to see a full-size version of them. Pay special attention to the beams--see those stairstep patterns? Those are the dreaded "jaggies."

To smooth out the sharp edges, your graphics card is performing display calculations for an image at 5120-by-3200 pixel resolution (four times the size of 1280-by-800), sampling (collecting) the colors and blending them to create a smoother image at your 1280-by-800 resolution. Put simply, your graphics card is collecting the color data of four pixels, and combining them into one, thousands of times a second, reducing the "jaggy" effect that appears when you have sharp color contrast between pixels.

If that sounds like a lot of work for every frame of animation, it is: Supersampling is a resource-intensive, brute-force approach to anti-aliasing, and if your hardware isn't up to snuff it can seriously bog down your PC's performance.