Overview: Have you ever noticed the "furry" edges of text or especially along lines that are just off of perfectly horizontal in PowerPoint or Presenter? This is called "Aliasing". It’s a result of having to represent a sharp edge that is not perfectly vertical or horizontal within a matrix of dots (pixels) that are perfectly spaced and aligned.

To remedy this undesirable effect, Presenter allows you to turn on a feature of your graphics hardware called “Antialiasing” or “Multi-sampling”. That is done in the Prefs > Advanced Options dialog. Look for the High, Med, Low, and None radio buttons in the Graphics Hardware Setting section of the dialog.

For a visual reference, view a page of example images that shows different levels of antialiasing.

Antialiasing puts significant demands on your graphics system. Adjusting your antialiasing settings too high will greatly diminish the playback rate of your presentation in Presenter or FXShow. We will show you how to tune your antialiasing levels appropriately for optimal performance and image quality during both editing and presentation.

To best understand the settings, read our page on important antialiasing considerations

Recommendations: There are several things you can do to assure high quality and best performance in your presentations:

• Change your screen resolution to what it will be for a presentation BEFORE arriving and run completely through your presentation at that resolution. Evaluate image quality and performance. Set your antialiasing level and leave those resolution and antialiasing levels until after the presentation is concluded.
• Do not put a large image as a background on your desktop. For a high resolution screen just one such image can consume 7-8 MB of video / texture memory.
• Close all other applications.