There are two very important factors in anti-aliasing: performance and quality. A good anti-aliasing technique must be fast and should produce acceptable quality results. FXAA stands very positive on these aspects. It's faster compared to MSAA, which provides roughly 25 percent reduction in performance overhead compared to the SSAA technique. This works in the same resolution as the texture, which eliminates extra overhead similar to other techniques, where the texture has scaled to a higher resolution and then downsampled.

FXAA works on the specific details of an image; it systematically detects the stair-step case effect in the given image and blurs it out. Stair-steps are recognized with an edge detection algorithm. Therefore, the quality of edge detection and blurring algorithm are very important factors here. An incorrect algorithm may miss important edges or detect incorrect edges, which may produce an unpleasant quality after blurring.