A hummingbird in flight, iridescent blue and green plumage lit against a dark ground

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

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: Colibri AA modes against SMAA, TAA, MSAA 4x + SMAA, FSR 3.1 and MetalFX on an RTX 4070 Laptop and an Apple M2 Pro

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.

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, then Flash. 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 rangeresolves 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 11loads its own compute build; Direct3D 12, Vulkan and Metal get the main one
the driver has wave intrinsicspacks edge candidates through them; without them, through atomics
the GPU is Apple siliconthe pass runs in 16-bit; on Windows GPUs it stays 32-bit, which is faster there
the camera format cannot be written by computeworks through its own target instead of the camera one
the engine is Unity 6.4 or newerwrites straight into the camera target; older versions go through a copy

Side by side

Colibri AA vs SMAA, TAA, MSAA and FSR.

Nine methods on one crop — No AA, the three 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.

Demo builds go live together with the Asset Store release.

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

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.