Computational Cost and Adaptive Supersampling
Supersampling is computationally expensive because it requires much greater video card memory and memory bandwidth, since the amount of buffer used is several times larger. A way around this problem is adaptive supersampling. This works by acknowledging that very few pixels will actually be on a boundary, therefore only these need to be supersampled.
At first only a few samples are made within a pixel. If these values are very similar, only these samples are used for determining color. If not, more are used. The result of this method is that a higher number of samples are calculated only where necessary, thus improving performance.
Read more about this topic: Supersampling
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