Evaluation of Antialiasing Techniques on Mobile Devices
Tiago Miguel Rodrigues de Almeida, João Madeiras Pereira, Jorge Joao · 2019
In the last years, the adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones has been massive. Mobile devices are used to play video-games as well as to simulate virtual worlds in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality experiences. In the field of real-time rendering, antialiasing is still an open problem, with recent advances focusing on post-processing and temporal solutions. Particularly, for mobile environments, research on this topic is scarce. This work analyses a set of antialiasing techniques commonly used on desktop applications and their suitability for mobile devices. An Android application was developed to test four antialiasing techniques and the results were evaluated in terms of computational performance and visual quality. The results show that while multisampling antialiasing (MSAA) and fast-approximate antialiasing (FXAA) provide the fastest execution and subpixel morphological antialiasing (SMAA) draws images of superior quality, the optimal balance is obtained with MSAA. Performance figures are similar to desktop implementations, with the exception of MSAA which performs better due to the tiled-based rendering architecture present on mobile GPUs.