TAA isn't a crutch being used to hold up poor performance, it's an optimization to give games anti-aliasing that doesn't suck.

Your other options for AA are

* Supersampling. Rendering the game at a higher resolution than the display and downscaling it. This is incredibly expensive.

* MSAA. This samples ~~vertices~~surfaces more than once per pixel, smoothing over jaggies. This worked really well back before we started covering every surface with pixel shaders. Nowadays it just makes pushing triangles more expensive with very little visual benefit, because the pixel shaders are still done at 1x scale and thus still aliased.

* Post-process AA (FXAA,SMAA, etc). These are a post-process shader applied to the whole screen after the scene has been fully rendered. They often just use a cheap edge detection algorithm and try to blur them. I've never seen one that was actually effective at producing a clean image, as they rarely catch all the edges and do almost nothing to alleviate shimmering.

I've seen a lot of "tech" YouTubers try to claim TAA is a product of lazy developers, but not one of them has been able to demonstrate a viable alternative antialiasing solution that solves the same problem set with the same or better performance. Meanwhile TAA and its various derivatives like DLAA have only gotten better in the last 5 years, alleviating many of the problems TAA became notorious for in the latter '10s.

Yeah. Only problem is that overly aggressive TAA implementations blur the whole frame during camera rotation. The thing that is even better than standard TAA is a combination of TAA and temporal upscaling, called TSR in Unreal. Still better is the same system but performed by an ML model, e.g. DLSS. Though this requires special inference hardware inside the GPU.

In the past, MSAA worked reasonably well, but it was relatively expensive, doesn't apply to all forms of high frequency aliasing, and it doesn't work anymore with the modern rendering paradigm anyway.

ThreatInteractive is an anti-TAA developer/YouTuber. They make a compelling argument against TAA and present an alternative they are working on for Unreal.

Erm your description of MSAA isn't quite correct, it has nothing to do with vertices and doesn't increase vertex processing cost..

It's more similar to supersampling, but without the higher pixel shader cost (the pixel shader still only runs once per "display pixel", not once per "sample" like in supersampling).

A pixel shader's output is written to multiple (typically 2, 4 or 8) samples, with a coverage mask deciding which samples are written (this coverage mask is all 1s inside a triangle and a combo of 1s and 0s along triangle edges). After rendering to the MSAA render target is complete, an MSAA resolve operation is performed which merges samples into pixels (and this gives you the smoothed triangle edges).

> solves the same problem set with the same or better performance

The games industry has spent the last decade adopting techniques that misleadingly inflate the simple, easily-quantified metrics of FPS and resolution, by sacrificing quality in ways that are harder to quantify. Until you have good metrics for quantifying the motion artifacts and blurring introduced by post-processing AA, upscaling, and temporal AA or frame generation, it's dishonest to claim that those techniques solve the same problem with better performance. They're giving you a worse image, and pointing to the FPS numbers as evidence that they're adequate is focusing on entirely the wrong side of the problem.

That's not to say those techniques aren't sometimes the best available tradeoff, but it's wrong to straight-up ignore the downsides because they're hard to measure.