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Colibri AA · Anti-aliasing for Unity URP

Weightless. Instant. Exact.

Colibri AA is an ultra-fast anti-aliasing suite built on CMAA2. Designed for the sharpest image with no blur, at the highest performance possible.

Watch the demo Documentation

Unity URP · one switch in the renderer

Meet Colibri AA.

Ultralight CMAA-based anti-aliasing for Unity URP, built around a simple idea: a cleaner image should keep its character.

Fantasy Kingdom 1920×1080 RTX 4070 Laptop · D3D12

Loupe 4×Modes switched live

Fantasy Kingdom under the loupe: the same frame with the anti-aliasing mode switching

Edges, textures, motion — the same scene with the mode changing underneath the loupe: the flag and its rope, the merlons, the window bars. Fantasy Kingdom is a demo scene by Unity Technologies, used for comparison only.

Frame rate in Unity URP, Fantasy Kingdom at 2560×1440. RTX 4070 Laptop, Direct3D 12: No AA 144 fps, CF 138 fps, CT2x Ultra 136 fps, SMAA 135 fps, TAA 131 fps, CT2x 122 fps, C2x 122 fps, MSAA 4x + SMAA 112 fps, FSR 3.1 105 fps. Apple M2 Pro, Metal: No AA 103 fps, CF 97 fps, SMAA 96 fps, CT2x Ultra 95 fps, TAA 95 fps, CT2x 91 fps, C2x 88 fps, MSAA 4x + SMAA 79 fps, MetalFX 68 fps, FSR 3.1 60 fps

Four anti-aliasing modes

Pick your AA mode.

CF Colibri Flash

One pass over the finished frame, with no history kept. Nothing trails behind movement, so it suits fast action and competitive games. Based on CMAA2. Reworked from the ground up.

C2x Flash over MSAA 2×

MSAA draws the thin geometry, Flash finishes the shaded edges. For scenes carried by fences, poles and cables.

CT2x MSAA 2× + two frames

Two frames offset by a fraction of a pixel, on top of MSAA 2×. The steadiest on thin broken detail: wires against the sky, distant railings.

CT2x Ultra Flash + two frames

The two-frame mode with Flash in place of MSAA. Close to the cost of Flash alone.

It tunes itself

To the project, Unity and the API.

One switch in the renderer. Everything below is decided by reading what the project already is — colour range, post-processing, MSAA, engine version, API and graphics device. The same package gives the most optimized pass on every machine it lands on.

the camera is HDR and post-processing stays in display range→resolves after post-processing; otherwise before it

MSAA is 1×, 2× or 4×→picks the offset pattern: quarter, eighth-across, eighth

the device is on Direct3D 11→loads its own compute build; Direct3D 12, Vulkan and Metal get the main one

the driver has wave intrinsics→packs edge candidates through them; without them, through atomics

the GPU is Apple silicon→the pass runs in 16-bit; on Windows GPUs it stays 32-bit, which is faster there

the camera format cannot be written by compute→works through its own target instead of the camera one

the engine is Unity 6.4 or newer→writes straight into the camera target; older versions go through a copy

Anti-aliasing comparison in Unity URP on one Fantasy Kingdom crop: No AA, Colibri AA modes CF, C2x and CT2x, SMAA, MSAA + SMAA, TAA, FSR 3.1 and MetalFX, with the share of fine detail each keeps

GPU cost per frame and added latency at 4K in Unity URP, RTX 4070 Laptop, Direct3D 12. GPU time added per frame: CF 0.30 ms, SMAA 0.61 ms, CT2x 0.86 ms, C2x 0.95 ms, TAA 1.44 ms, MSAA + SMAA 1.55 ms, MetalFX about 3.52 ms, FSR 3.1 5.16 ms. Latency added: CF 0.88 ms, SMAA 1.89 ms, CT2x 2.62 ms, C2x 2.82 ms, TAA 4.33 ms, MSAA + SMAA 4.72 ms, FSR 3.1 15.41 ms. Fine texture detail kept against no anti-aliasing: CF 98 percent, C2x 98 percent, SMAA 97 percent, CT2x 96 percent, MSAA + SMAA 96 percent, MetalFX 91 percent, TAA 76 percent

Slide: what Colibri Flash does that the built-in methods do not

Slide: how Colibri AA configures itself per project and device

Side by side

The same frame, every method.

Nine methods on one crop — No AA, three of the Colibri AA modes, SMAA, MSAA 4× + SMAA, TAA, FSR 3.1 and MetalFX — the cost of each in milliseconds, and what the pass changes inside a frame. Every figure here comes from a run on our own stand.

Stress-test scene Grids, wires, glossy spheres

Every mode live

The Colibri window in the editor above the stress-test scene with grids, wires and glossy spheres

Inside the Unity editor

See Colibri AA at work.

The Colibri window with its settings, our anti-aliasing stress stand, and every mode one after another — what each of them does to grids, thin wires and glossy highlights.

Download for Windows64-bit Download for macOSApple silicon

Engraving: three figures in goggles and heavy cloaks walking through a ruined Victorian street

Games · In development

The Glass Ark

A saga of people under a sky that kills. Survive at the Station, go out in small groups into dead London of 1879, and follow one story from the last day of the old world.

Make1ive Studio emblem: a Japanese house under a red sun, birds in flight

The studio

Make1ive Studio

Independent, small on purpose. We build rendering tools for Unity that we need for our own game, then ship them so you never have to write them. Colibri AA is the first, The Glass Ark is the reason.

Support for Colibri AA goes to the same address. Put your Unity version and graphics API in the first line and you get an answer from whoever wrote that pass.

Contact

Write to the studio Unity Asset Store YouTube

整理　整頓　清掃　清潔　躾

Seiri · seiton · seisou · seiketsu · shitsuke — sort, set in order, shine, standardise, sustain. Five words of the order we keep to.