Enabling Antialiasing (Multisampling)

Demonstrates how to enable antialiasing for your game.

Figure 1.  Antialiasing the edges of a cube: multisampling is disabled on the left, and enabled on the right.

Antialiasing is a technique for minimizing distortion artifacts caused by aliasing when rendering a high-resolution signal (such as a sharp edge) at a low resolution (such as in a render target with a fixed number of pixel locations). Antialiasing smoothes sharp edges by partially rendering to neighboring pixels. This technique is also called multisampling because each pixel value can be the result of multiple samples. Enabling antialiasing on the Xbox 360 will have a small performance impact; enabling antialiasing on PCs may have a large impact on performance.

The Complete Sample

The code in this topic shows you the technique. You can download a complete code sample for this topic, including full source code and any additional supporting files required by the sample.

Download AntiAliasing_Sample.zip.

Enabling Antialiasing

To enable antialiasing in your game

• Render 3D geometry. One way to do this is by creating a BasicEffect using the BasicEffect class. For more detail, see Creating a Basic Effect.

• Set PreferMultiSampling to true in your Game class constructor.

  graphics.PreferMultiSampling = true;
  

• Set the view matrix to place the camera close to the object so you can more clearly see the smoothed, antialiased edges.

  worldMatrix = Matrix.CreateRotationX(tilt) * Matrix.CreateRotationY(tilt);
  
  viewMatrix = Matrix.CreateLookAt(new Vector3(1.75f, 1.75f, 1.75f), Vector3.Zero, Vector3.Up);
  
  projectionMatrix = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(
      MathHelper.ToRadians(45),  // 45 degree angle
      (float)GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width /
      (float)GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height,
      1.0f, 100.0f);
  

• Draw the geometry by calling GraphicsDevice.DrawPrimitives.

  RasterizerState rasterizerState1 = new RasterizerState();
  rasterizerState1.CullMode = CullMode.None;
  graphics.GraphicsDevice.RasterizerState = rasterizerState1;
  foreach (EffectPass pass in basicEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes)
  {
      pass.Apply();
  
      graphics.GraphicsDevice.DrawPrimitives(
          PrimitiveType.TriangleList,
          0,
          12
      );
  }
  

See Also

Concepts

3D Pipeline Basics
What Is Antialiasing?

Reference

GraphicsDeviceManager
PreparingDeviceSettings
PresentationParameters