Anti-aliasing decides how jagged edges are smoothed, and in UE5 it is also the stage that upscales the image when the game renders below the output resolution. The two jobs are welded together, which is why one setting in this category changes the meaning of six others.

r.AntiAliasingMethod is that setting. It selects the algorithm, and each algorithm reads its own family of CVars and ignores the rest:

TAA (2) reads every r.TemporalAA* line and ignores every r.TSR* line.
TSR (4) reads every r.TSR* line and ignores every r.TemporalAA* line.

Whichever method is active, roughly half of this category is inert. That is not a bug in the values; it is the shape of the engine. The applies when field on each entry below says which half it belongs to.

DLSS and FSR sit on top of both. Their UE plugins register as the engine's temporal upscaler and replace the TAA or TSR pass, so they need *a* temporal method active but do not care which. What switches them off is 0, 1 or 3, and this app never writes those.

Since 2026-08-30 the method is a user option (anti-aliasing-method) whose default writes no line at all. See that entry below.

Seven entries in this paper are marked not used. They are real names that appeared in the audited config and were graded inert, and they are documented here rather than forgotten because all four are anti-aliasing controls. An inert name that turns out to be live in some engine revision would quietly override the choice the user just made in the dropdown, which is a different and worse failure than an inert name for anything else. They were switched off on 2026-08-30 and are written nowhere.

Three more joined them on 2026-08-31, from AMD's FSR sharpening. They were found during the variable rate shading review because that category has a command called ContrastAdaptiveShading, and FSR's sharpener is Contrast Adaptive Sharpening. The acronym is the same and the two have nothing to do with each other; sharpening after an upscale belongs here.