I’ll be honest—I didn’t expect anti-aliasing to be such a pain point when polishing my Unreal Engine 5 project. I figured I’d pick one, check the visuals, move on.
But the deeper I went, the more I realized: each anti-aliasing method in Unreal Engine has trade-offs, and those trade-offs can seriously affect your game’s look and performance.
So I did what any overly obsessive dev would do—I tested them all.
Step 1: Start with the Default (TAA)
Unreal Engine 5 defaults to TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing), and for good reason. It does a solid job with edge smoothing and gets rid of most aliasing artifacts. But for me, the issue was clarity.
- UI elements looked blurry
- Fine textures felt soft
- Movement introduced a ghosting/trailing effect, especially with camera pans or particle effects
TAA is technically solid, but it was making my visuals feel…muddy. Especially in a high-detail environment with lots of small assets.
Step 2: Try FXAA – Fast But Not Pretty
Next, I tried FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing). It’s super lightweight, and yeah—performance improved a bit. But the image quality took a hit.
FXAA doesn’t have any kind of temporal feedback, so:
- Edge shimmer was way more noticeable
- Distant geometry looked noisy
- Fast movement created flickering, especially on foliage or wire meshes
It was crisp, but unstable. Good for low-end builds maybe, but not what I wanted for the final look.
Step 3: MSAA? Not for Deferred Rendering
I also looked into MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing), which I’ve used in other engines. But UE5’s deferred renderer doesn’t support MSAA out of the box, so unless you’re using forward rendering (rare in most UE5 projects), it’s not an option.
That took it off the table pretty quickly.
Step 4: Discovering TSR — And Why It’s a Game-Changer
I’d heard about TSR (Temporal Super Resolution) mostly in the context of performance upscaling. What I didn’t realize is that it also replaces TAA as an anti-aliasing method—and does a far better job in many cases.
When I enabled TSR and set the screen percentage to 75%, two things happened:
- Image sharpness improved dramatically. The blur from TAA was gone.
- Aliasing was still handled well. No crawling edges, no shimmer.
Even better—because TSR reconstructs the image using temporal samples, it gave me better-looking visuals at a lower render resolution, which boosted performance by around 15-20%.
Basically: cleaner visuals and a smoother frame rate.
Why TSR Works So Well
TSR works by blending motion vectors, depth, and color history from previous frames to upscale and smooth the current frame. It’s like TAA, but smarter and sharper.
Unlike TAA, which often over-blurs to hide aliasing, TSR uses more data to make better decisions. The result is:
- Sharp edges without shimmer
- Cleaner motion without ghosting
- Stable image at reduced screen percentage
It’s not perfect—there can still be minor artifacts, especially on translucency—but for most cases, it’s the best anti-aliasing solution in UE5 right now.
My Final Settings for Anti-Aliasing in UE5
Here’s what I ended up using in my project:
[SystemSettings]
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=3 ; 0=None, 1=FXAA, 2=TAA, 3=TSR
r.TSR.ShadingRejection.Flickering=1 ; Optional, helps with shimmering
r.TemporalAA.Upsampling=1 ; Required for TSR to work as upscaler
r.ScreenPercentage=75 ; Renders at 75%, upscales to 100%
In the editor:
- Go to Project Settings > Rendering > Anti-Aliasing Method and set it to TSR
- Use r.ScreenPercentage in your level’s console or camera settings to adjust render scale
Pro tip: if you’re using Lumen, TSR pairs really well with it, since it helps maintain a cleaner look when dynamic lighting introduces noise.
TL;DR – Best Anti-Aliasing for Unreal Engine 5
- TAA: Decent, but blurry
- FXAA: Sharp, but flickery and unstable
- MSAA: Not compatible with deferred rendering
- TSR: Best all-around choice — sharp, stable, and gives a performance boost
If you’re building in Unreal Engine 5 and want clean, stable visuals without tanking your performance, switching to TSR is absolutely worth it. I wish I’d tried it sooner.
Let me know if you want a side-by-side comparison or a breakdown on how TSR interacts with things like Nanite or Lumen. There’s more to unpack here, but this setup finally got me the image quality I was chasing.