Jaggies are blurry jagged lines that appear in raster images due to reduced resolution. Anti-aliasing can reduce roughness, and vector graphics don’t produce jaggies. Temporal anti-aliasing corrects irregularities in motion graphics, and FSAA is used to reduce stuttering in video games. The term “jaggies” comes from the Atari video game Rescue on Fractalus!.
Jaggies is the slang term for the blurry jagged lines that can appear in computer graphics. They typically occur in raster images, also known as bitmaps, that have a reduced resolution. The lines look like steps and appear in place of straight or curved lines at the edges of the image.
Bitmap images often have jaggies because they are made up of separate square pixels of various colors and shades. When their size is changed, a process called aliasing adds or removes pixels in such a way that a representation error, also known as an artifact, emerges. Artifacts often have a scale-like appearance due to this addition or subtraction of pixels around the edges of the image. Non-raster graphics, known as vector graphics, rely on a mathematical formula rather than pixels to represent images. This is why vector graphics don’t produce jaggies.
Computer graphics or animated videos may also have jaggies. Temporal posterization is responsible for producing these artifacts in motion graphics. This process describes what happens visually when the number of frames in a video decreases, but its speed remains the same.
Roughness can be reduced in computer graphics by anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing adds shaded pixels to areas around the edges of the image to create a smoother look. Temporal anti-aliasing, also known as motion blur, can correct irregularities in motion graphics or video. In video, this process takes into account the scene or image captured over a span of time, not just one instance. Temporal anti-aliasing makes the image appear as if it is hurtling across the screen.
Full-screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) is used in three-dimensional graphics cards to reduce stuttering in video game systems. The method applies anti-aliasing to all three-dimensional images on the screen. The most commonly used anti-aliasing technique in FSAA is oversampling. Oversampling involves doubling or quadrupling the resolution of each frame. The frames are then downsampled to match the resolution of the display.
The term “jaggies” is believed to come from the Atari video game Rescue on Fractalus!, released in 1985. One of the game’s computer graphics was not anti-aliased. Due to the low resolution on the Atari system, artifacts were never eliminated from the image and the developers have described the effect as “jagged”. They later called the enemies in the game “Jaggi” and reportedly wanted to name the video game Behind Jaggi Lines.
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