FXAA is an anti-aliasing algorithm that works on a resulting image, trying to find and smooth visual borders without taking into account depth and source geometry. This allows the algorithm to work very quickly, and in addition makes it compatible with any type of render, including deferred render, the technology that is currently a de facto standard in video games

MSAA is an algorithm implemented into the video card (hardware), antialiasing geometrical boundaries by means of additional samples at the border of the triangles. This provides a better visual result for silhouettes and remote objects at the expense of higher performance cost. This technology virtually provides antialiasing for boundaries (silhouettes) of geometrical objects and does not improve visual quality elsewhere. Besides this, such technology is hardly compatible with deferred render in practice and an acceptable result for modern rendering requires additional tricks, leading to additional calculation costs and visual issues and limitations.