Anti-aliasing is a quite popular buzzword that you'll find on many product spec sheets. Anti-aliasing can best be described as a method of smoothing out jagged edges in order to improve the quality of a rendered image.

To date, anti-aliasing hasn't exactly been in wide use in real-time 3D entertainment titles but as it is supported in Microsoft's Direct3D API as well as in OpenGL and in 3dfx's native GLIDE it will surely be a feature of the future. (Amongst the titles that do support anti-aliasing we can mention Rollcage and G-police, both from Psygnosis). Now let's have a look at anti-aliasing in action and what it can offer:

As you see in this very simple example, the visual quality of the anti-aliased image (second one) is superior to that of the non anti-aliased one. The effect isn't quite as dramatic in a game scene but there is certainly a noticeable difference.