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.