Jaggies are artifacts in raster images, most frequently from aliasing,[1] which in turn is often caused by non-linear mixing effects producing high-frequency components, or missing or poor anti-aliasing filtering prior to sampling.
Jaggies can occur for a variety of reasons, the most common being that the output device (display monitor or printer) does not have sufficient resolution to portray a smooth line.
The downside of anti-aliasing is that it reduces contrast – rather than sharp black/white transitions, there are shades of gray – and the resulting image can appear fuzzy.
While machine learning-based upscaling techniques such as DLSS can be used to infer this missing information, other types of artifacts may be introduced in the process.
[3] In real-time 3D rendering such as in video games, various anti-aliasing techiques are used to remove jaggies created by the edges of polygons and other contrasting lines.