Antialiasing smooths jagged edges on text, lines, and edges of image output formats by the process of supersampling. Tecplot RS renders a large intermediate image and then reduces it to the final image size. It creates each pixel on the final image from multiple rendered pixels. The width and height of the intermediate image are the width and height of the final image times the scale factor, the Supersample Factor. You can use values from 2 to 16, although usually a factor of 3 renders sufficiently. Large scale factors take much more time and memory. Some graphics cards limit the dimensions of rendered images to a maximum of 2048x2048 or 4096x4096 pixels, and thus Tecplot RS cannot antialias if it results in an intermediate image larger than this limit.
Antialiasing uses many colors, although since certain image formats have limits of 256 colors, they cannot always represent antialiased images correctly. The image formats limited to 256 color include AVI, Raster Metafile, and any image format with the Convert to 256 Colors option selected. With these formats, the antialiasing works for plots with a very limited selection of colors (like a red mesh on a black field). Otherwise, antialiasing with 256 colors wastes time and may decrease plot quality.
Using animation formats can amplify the antialiasing and 256-color problem. Both AVI and Raster Metafile support only 256 colors, and need to use them to display multiple frames. For these formats, try a test animation of a few steps with antialiasing on before creating the entire animation.
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You can use antialiasing only with image export rendering performed off-screen (the default setting). In some cases, you may find that you need to turn off the off-screen rendering (usually due problems with a graphics card).