Supersampling

From DmWiki

Supersampling is a method of implementing Antialiasing. Basically, it works by rendering the image at a high resolution, and then resampling it down to the final resolution, meaning to take the calculated average of the group of pixels corresponding to the final pixel.

Supersampling consumes a lot of memory. For example for doing 4x supersampling, four times the memory of the final images is needed: For a final screen resolution of 800x600 pixels, (for 4X supersampling) supersampling needs a 1600x1200 buffer. In addition, when using complex calculations per pixel (like trough pixel shaders) supersampling can cause the performance to drop significantly. Thus, more sophisticated algorithms have been developed for doing antialiasing, such as Multisampling.