Abstract: We present surface based anti-aliasing (SBAA), a new approach to real-time anti-aliasing for deferred renderers that improves the performance and lowers the memory requirements for anti-aliasing methods that sample sub-pixel visibility. We introduce a novel way of decoupling visibility determination from shading that, compared to previous multi-sampling based approaches, significantly reduces the number of samples stored and shaded per pixel. Unlike post-process anti-aliasing techniques used in conjunction with deferred renderers, SBAA correctly resolves visibility of sub-pixel features, minimizing spatial and temporal artifacts.