The Theory of Antialiasing

To render a 3D scene it must first be broken down into flat triangular surfaces, each of which is defined by its three corners in space (vertices). Each triangle has one or more patterns (textures) painted onto its surface, and lighting within the scene can further modify these colors. Most modern graphics processors build the scene up by painting (rendering) one triangle at a time while constantly calculating which pixels of the current triangle are visible with respect to that which has already been drawn. This image is built up within a section of graphics memory called a frame-buffer and when complete it is then displayed on the computer monitor while the next image is being constructed.