OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

Multisampling

Multisampling is a technique for smoothing the edges of geometric primitives—commonly known as antialiasing. There are many ways to do antialiasing, and OpenGL supports different methods for supporting antialiasing. Other methods require some techniques we haven’t discussed yet, so we’ll defer that conversation until “Per-Primitive Antialiasing” on Page 178.

Multisampling works by sampling each geometric primitive multiple times per pixel. Instead of keeping a single color (and depth and stencil values, if present) for each pixel, multisampling uses multiple samples, which are like mini-pixels, to store color, depth, and stencil values at each sample location. When it comes time to present the final image, all of the samples