AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing

Tangent: my biggest problem with AA is something adjacent to it, which is that almost none of my games bother explain what the differences are between the different abbreviations available in the settings, half of which are completely unknown to me. Like, sure, I can look them up but a little bit of user-friendliness would be appreciated.

This article will probably help for future reference though!

Games/graphics are one of those domains with a lot of jargon for sure. If you don't want to be a wizard you can just mess with it and see what happens. I like how dolphin approaches this with extensive tooltips in the settings, but there's always going to be some implicit knowledge.

On a meta level - I feel like I've seen anti-acronym sentiment a lot recently. I feel like it's never been easier to look these things up. There's definitely levels of acronyms which are anti-learning or a kind of protectionism, but to my mind there are appropriate levels of it to use because you have to label concepts at a useful level to accomplish things, and graphics settings of a game definitely are on the reasonable side.

The PS4 Pro introduced the gaming world to the simplification of settings from dozens of acronyms that were common to PC Gamers, down to “Performance” and “Quality”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s now a market demand for that to spread back to PC land.

> just mess with it and see what happens

And even if you know every detail, that's still the best course of action, I think. Which kind of antialiasing you prefer, and how it trades with performance and resolution is highly subjective, and it can be "none".

There are 3 components to rescaling/rendering pixels: aliasing, sharpness and locality. Aliasing is, well, aliasing, sharpness is the opposite of blurriness, and locality is about these "ringing" artefacts you often see in highly compressed images and videos. You can't be perfect on all three. Disabling antialiasing gives you the sharpest image with no ringing artefacts, but you get these ugly staircase effects. Typical antialiasing trades this for blurriness, in fact, FXAA is literally a (selective) blur, that's why some people don't like it. More advanced algorithms can give you both antialiasing and sharpness, but you will get these ringing artefacts. The best of course is to increase resolution until none of these effects become noticeable, but you need the hardware.

The best algorithms attempt to find a good looking balance between all these factors and performance, but "good looking" is subjective, that's why your best bet is to try for yourself. Or just keep the defaults, as it is likely to be set to what the majority of the people prefer.

PC games have had Low, Medium, High presets for graphics settings for decades. I don't think reducing that from 3 choices to 2 is going to be a big win for user friendliness. And I certainly think it's user-hostile if it means taking the customization away and only letting users choose between two presets.

PlayStation does have shining examples of user-friendly settings UI though, namely in their PC ports. Look at this UI in Ratchet and Clank:

https://x.com/digitalfoundry/status/1684221473819447298

Extensive tooltips for each option and any time you change a setting it is applied immediately to the paused game while you're still in the settings menu allowing you to immediately compare the effects.

> I don't think reducing that from 3 choices to 2 is going to be a big win for user friendliness

It’s nowhere near as simple as 3 settings now there are different antialiasing techniques, path tracing lighting or reflections, upscaling (multiple algorithms) etc.

Nothing is all just fully positive and each has tradeoffs

Nixxes are very enthusiastic about every PC port having proper settings and exclusive options. I hope the C-levels at Sony continue to not notice.

Those are typically incorporated into the presets. I am not just talking about Low, Medium, High for individual settings. There's almost always a preset option that will set all the other settings according to what's deemed appropriate by the developer for the selected quality level.