Antialiasing

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About

"Antialiasing" sounds like a geeky term but its visual effects can be understood easily.

First of all, you may know "Anti" is often used as a prefix to mean "against", so why do we need to be against "aliasing"? In computer graphics, "aliasing" (and an expanded technical definition) refers to the dreaded jaggies that appear, noticeably on curved edges. If you've wondered why the Second Life Viewer's graphics appear rougher than other 3D experiences you're accustomed to, this is part of the reason.

See the difference?

The good news is this can easily be overcome. If you have a graphics card that meets or exceeds our System Recommendations, antialiasing is almost surely supported. On slower graphics cards, you may be able to turn on antialiasing, but it may cause a noticeable performance hit — so you should experiment and see what's best for you.

What use is antialiasing?

Antialiasing is useful whenever you're looking at Second Life, since it improves image quality.

In particular, antialiasing is great if you're making videos or taking product pictures for Xstreet/Marketplace listings, because it makes your goods appear much crisper with fewer "digital artifacts".

Great, so how do I do it?

1. Choose Me menu > Preferences.
2. Click the Graphics tab.
3. Click the Hardware button. (If you've never been here before, don't worry, it's fairly un-obvious but you'll wonder how you ever lived without it after!)
4. Click the Antialiasing dropdown and change it from Disabled to 2x or even 4x (which Torley prefers as a balance).
   • Related, you may also want to check Anisotropic Filtering. This makes textures at angles (like rotated signs in the distance) appear sharper.
5. Click OK.
6. If you don't notice any difference yet, restart the Second Life Viewer. Now compare. The difference should be subtle yet noticeable.

What antialiasing level is the best?

Obviously, higher is better but 16x is quite taxing unless you have a very beefy graphics card. Here's why: to antialias, what you see is rendered at a higher-resolution multiple of itself, then scaled down. This is why the edges look smoother, because there's a higher quality image. But higher multiples require a lot more power.

Antialiasing is completely undoable, so again, experiment.

Where can I learn more?

Antialiasing is a general computer graphics concept, so there's plenty of info on Google and beyond.