Comment by TinkersW
21 hours ago
MSAA doesn't do anything for shader aliasing, it only handles triangle aliasing, and modern renderers have plenty of shader aliasing so there isn't much reason to use MSAA.
The high triangle count of modern renders might in some cases cause the MSAA to become closer to SSAA in terms of cost and memory usage, all for a rather small AA count relative to a temporal method.
Temporal AA can handle everything, and is relatively cheap, so it has replaced all the other approaches. I haven't used Unreal TAA, does Unreal not support the various vendor AI driven TAA's?
Pretty much every temporal AA i've seen looks like a smeary mess though.
MSAA by default handles aliasing at triangle edges, however at least in OpenGL and Vulkan (i couldn't find anything relevant in D3D11 last time i checked and D3D12 did have something that could be relevant, but i'm not sure) you can set the minimum amount of samples so you could also get some antialiasing in polygon interiors. Of course this is heavier (though still cheaper than SSAA) but IMO produces a better image than TAA.
Unreal has plugins to support other AA including DLSS and FSR (which can both be used just for AA IIRC). I tried FSR and it didn't work as well as the default TAA for certain cases, but I'm pretty sure I just had some flickering issue in my project that I was trying to use TAA to solve as a band aid so maybe not a great example of which AA methods are good. I'm not an expert and only use Unreal in my spare time.
>Temporal AA can handle everything
With the tradeoff of producing a blurry mess.
Sometimes TAA artifacts are so distracting that I end up disabling AA altogether and consider it an improvement.