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

Increasing Resolution

The effects of aliasing can be reduced through a brute force method called supersampling that performs sampling at several locations within a pixel and averages the result of those samples. This is exactly the approach supported in today’s graphics hardware with the multisample buffer. This method of antialiasing replaces a single-point sampling operation with a several-point sampling operation, so it doesn’t actually eliminate aliasing, but it can reduce aliasing to the point that it is no longer objectionable. You may be able to ignore the issue of aliasing if your shaders will always be used in conjunction with a multisample buffer.

But this approach does use up hardware resources (graphics board memory for storing the ...