MSAA Not Quite Magic?

Since I’ve been developing VR in Unreal, anti aliasing has been one of my largest stumbling blocks. After hearing about MSAA it really seemed like a magical solution that just stabilized VR content without blurring (like Temporal AA), but my geometry still resembles marching ants.

I understand Specular aliasing is a problem in MSAA and have gladly adopted the Normal Roughness Compositing technique the RoboRecall team put together. However, geometry aliasing seems to still be very heavy in my scenes compared to others. I was just wondering what I might be overlooking in my scenes. Does it come down to just making sure geometry is always large and close to the user?

I would love to hear peoples insight to making a strong scene without aliasing artifacts in MSAA. The oculus menu screens always stand out to me as having really strong content with minimal artifacts. Is VR content just made to be stylized? Thanks for your insight!


This scene from Tav I’ve been checking out seems to illustrate this well:

Left is Temporal AA, Right is MSAA. Click for gifs.