Testing anti-aliasing with 007 Goldeneye

Anti-aliasing is the practice of removing the pixely edges of vectors to make them seem more natural when contrasted with the background they’re displayed on… And since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me just show you a picture of what it looks like:

antialias

So it pretty much looks a bit like a blur, but the difference is appreciated more when you make the image smaller:

antialias2

See how the top letter looks like it has jagged edges while the bottom seems smoother and more natural? That’s what anti-aliasing does. It’s not always implemented because it requires some extra computing power to process and that is often quite limited.

If you use a gameshark or a flash drive, you can edit the anti-aliasing setting on the game you’re playing to have it disabled. But the real question I have is – Why on earth would you want to do this? It definitely takes away from the realism of the game (I know the graphics aren’t realistic but bear with me) by adding another layer of artificiality to the outcoming image. If removing anti-aliasing somehow improves the game by increasing the framerate, or if it is compensated by an increase in image resolution, then I might understand why this would be appealing. But to the naked eye, I don’t see why this is something to pursue.

The place where I see that removing anti-alising would work is in sprite games like on the NES and SNES where everything is made out of pixelly blocks that go vertically and horizontally, but not on the Nintendo 64 where you have slanted vectors that appear jagged without it.

Articles across the web

By using a cheat device, you can remove anti-aliasing from your Nintendo 64 games. But the question is - do you really want to?
Article published on N64 Squid

Search

Subscribe to the mailing list

Follow N64 Squid

  • RSS Feed
  • YouTube

Random featured posts

Leave a Reply

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Website

Your Message