FXAA (Fast Approximate) is known for looking like vaseline smeared on the screen (used because it doesn’t give much performance hit), but other types are usually effective at removing aliasing on sharp corners without adding a blurring effect.
SSAA (Super Sampling) applies to the entire screen, and in a way is sort’ve rendering the whole game at a higher resolution and scaling it down to your monitor resolution. Downside is that can bring performance down too much if you’re hardware isn’t up for it.
MSAA (Multi Sampling) focuses just on the edges of things, where it’s most likely that the jaggy aliased pixels would be most noticeable. This is much easier for your computer to do, since it’s not doing the entire screen.
Of those, only FXAA should be blurry. However, there are now Temporal AA, Like DLSS, or DLAA. These can introduce a motion-blur effect during movement.
Lastly, FSR upscales a lower resolution to a higher one, which can make things blurry if the base image is too low of a resolution and lacks enough information to guess how to upscale it.
Why turn aa off?
It makes everything blurry
That usually depends on the specific type of AA.
FXAA (Fast Approximate) is known for looking like vaseline smeared on the screen (used because it doesn’t give much performance hit), but other types are usually effective at removing aliasing on sharp corners without adding a blurring effect.
SSAA (Super Sampling) applies to the entire screen, and in a way is sort’ve rendering the whole game at a higher resolution and scaling it down to your monitor resolution. Downside is that can bring performance down too much if you’re hardware isn’t up for it.
MSAA (Multi Sampling) focuses just on the edges of things, where it’s most likely that the jaggy aliased pixels would be most noticeable. This is much easier for your computer to do, since it’s not doing the entire screen.
Of those, only FXAA should be blurry. However, there are now Temporal AA, Like DLSS, or DLAA. These can introduce a motion-blur effect during movement.
Lastly, FSR upscales a lower resolution to a higher one, which can make things blurry if the base image is too low of a resolution and lacks enough information to guess how to upscale it.