Fix: objects look pixelated when small or far away

When you take a render, anything small or far from the camera can come out jagged, pixelated, or shimmery along its edges, even though the same object looks fine up close. That is aliasing: the anti-aliasing mode you are rendering with cannot resolve the fine, sub-pixel detail of distant or tiny geometry. It is an easy one to fix, and it is a single setting.

The fix

Open the Graphics plugin (F5) and find the Antialiasing (AA) setting. Change it to FSR3 or CTAA, then take the render again. Both resolve fine detail on small and distant geometry far better than the default or SMAA, so those objects come out clean instead of pixelated.

The reason they work here: FSR3 and CTAA accumulate detail across frames, and FSR3 also upscales, so they recover sub-pixel detail that simpler modes throw away. CTAA tends to be the sharpest on a close, still render; FSR3 is a good all-rounder that also helps performance.

Sharpen it back up. The temporal pass can soften edges slightly. FSR3 has a Sharpness slider (make sure its Perform Sharpen Pass option is on), and CTAA has an Adaptive Sharpness slider. Nudge it up until distant detail looks crisp, but stop before edges start to halo.

Quick reference

Symptom	Fix
Small or distant objects look pixelated in a render	Graphics (F5) > Antialiasing > FSR3 or CTAA
Edges still a little soft after switching	Raise FSR3’s Sharpness or CTAA’s Adaptive Sharpness
Ghosting or smearing on an animation or recording	Use SMAA instead; FSR3 and CTAA are for stills
Thin strand detail like hair still smears	SMAA plus 2x upsampling, see fixing hair

When SMAA is the better choice

FSR3 and CTAA are temporal, meaning they build detail across several frames. That is what makes them so clean on a still of solid geometry, but it has two limits:

Moving shots. On anything that moves, temporal AA ghosts and smears. For animations and recordings, set Antialiasing back to SMAA, which has no motion artifacts.
Very thin, high-frequency detail. Hair strands are fine enough that temporal AA can smear them even on a still. If a render is mostly about hair rather than distant scenery, fixing hair covers the SMAA plus upsampling approach that keeps strands crisp.

For the full picture of pairing anti-aliasing with resolution and upsampling, see clean screenshots and renders.