Antialiasing smooths jagged edges on text, lines, and edges of image output formats by the process of supersampling. A large intermediate image is rendered and then reduced to the final image size. Each pixel on the final image is created from multiple rendered pixels. The width and height of the intermediate image are the width and height of the final image times some scale factor. This scale factor is called the Supersample Factor. You can use values from 2 to 16. Factors greater than 3 are seldom necessary. Large scale factors take a lot more time and memory. Some graphics cards limit the dimensions of rendered images to a maximum of 2048x2048 or 4096x4096 pixels, and thus Tecplot 360 EX cannot antialias if the intermediate image would be larger than this limit. Some graphics drivers do not report an error in such situations, instead producing blank or garbled images.
Antialiasing uses many colors. If you are exporting with the Convert to 256 Colors option activated, antialiasing works for plots with a very limited selection of colors (like a red mesh on a black field). Otherwise, antialiasing to 256 colors wastes time and may decrease plot quality.
Using animation formats can amplify the antialiasing and 256-color problem, as the same 256 colors must generally be used for colors in all frames of the animation. For these formats, try a test animation of a few steps with antialiasing on before creating the entire animation.