Pretty much all “modern” anti-aliasing is some variant of the MSAA hack, and even that costs a quarter of your framerate. That’s prohibitively expensive, unless you have so much performance you don’t even care, which will rarely be true for any recent game. While the crawling lines of aliasing do bother me, I don’t feel anti-aliasing alone is worth giving up a quarter of my framerate and/or turning down other details to pay for it.
Well, I don’t know about that.
Given that we don’t need to tie mouse polling to frame scan these days, and that anything over, say, 60 fps won’t really be noticeable, how much do we really need? Are you sure you’re actually hitting framerate barriers that matter, now?
(Ie, given that many games cap at 60, and many monitors don’t do faster than 60-76hz refresh, losing 25% of your, say, 100fps gets you… still faster than it’ll display. And still faster than you’ll be able to see, most of the time if ever.)
A $199 video card can run full-HD, high-detail, 4xAA (16x oversample) at a framerate fast enough that I don’t notice the rate - which is all that matters.
Given the slow adoption of greater-than-HD display sizes, GPU power is making the “problem” of AA go away at the moment; perhaps this will change when you can get the 27" super-HD monitors for a sane price.