I implemented SMAA in the Untold Engine hoping it would solve the shimmering and aliasing artifacts I was seeing in large XR scenes on the Apple Vision Pro.
At first, things looked promising.
SMAA uses multiple rendering passes, edge detection, blend weight calculations, and precomputed lookup textures to produce sharper anti-aliasing than FXAA.
But once I started testing massive stadium scenes and distant geometry in XR, I realized the problem was much deeper than I expected.
In this video, I walk through:
- Implementing SMAA in my Swift + Metal renderer
- Debugging the SMAA rendering passes
- Building a magnifier tool to inspect pixel-level differences
- Why XR aliasing is much harder than standard post-processing
The Untold Engine is an open-source Swift + Metal renderer and engine focused on XR and Apple platforms.
Check out the Untold Engine: https://github.com/untoldengine/UntoldEngine
