you can get the best results with TAA (is what you should be using in 2022).
...
if the game has native TAA use that instead though.
TAA is
AWFUL though. Maybe it's specific game implementations rather than TAA itself, but I find it to be basically as blurry as FXAA in every game I've tried that offered it. I don't really have any better suggestions -- SMAA has been the best I can find, but it will never compare to what MSAA used to be and still leaves awful ugly aliasing everywhere -- but the TAA implementations at least in every game I've tried was about as like using FXAA and then added a very low grade sharpen filter afterwards. As a really worst case example, check out The Outer Worlds. You have to edit an INI to remove it, but the difference in video clarity is just night and day (though it's worth noting that apparently they are counting on this blurriness to hide some shortcuts they took in shadows, so you get a bit of ugly dithering in places without the blurriness hiding it.) Though I've seen the same stuff in several modern games (right down to apparently relying on the blurring to hide bad shadows.)
Honestly, you keep saying "in 2022" and I find that a bit funny because here in 2022 we are using 1080p or better and getting images as blurry as if we were going back to the days of using Glide with bilinear filtering to make an 800x600 (which was "high resolution" for 3DFx, lol) stretch to a 1024x768 display by default in games today. That is absolutely a step backwards and doesn't feel "in 2022" at all to me. I, for one, am actually getting a little tired of having to manually edit INI files, perform registry tweaks, etc etc, to undo that and get clarity from my games. In fact, I'm reminded of the Sega Genesis/Megadrive game console which only could do 61 colors at a time so games
heavily relied on just dithering and using the interpolation of an analog CRT screen to blur over that and smooth it out to try to make it look like it had more colors than it actually did. This isn't 2022, it's 1989 and it feels like we're trying to do RGB mods to get rid of the blurring -- except we have to do it for every single game and it's not even always the same methodology per game. *Sigh*
Anyway, SMAA seems to still be our best option. We have to trade a huge amount of aliasing slipping through for the sake of at least not having our games blurred into oblivion. As explained elsewhere, MSAA is something that has to be implemented in the game's rendering pipeline itself, not something that can be post-processed in. Though sometimes I suspect the biggest reason we don't have it today is because it was just too difficult for console hardware to handle in the past and devs just didn't bother implementing things differently on PC ports (these days it really feels like console versions get all the love and PC versions are just secondary.)
