Are Cycles render passes with antialias?

Hi guys,
I tried a lot of things, boosting samples, raise the resolution of my render a lot and I understand this: the beauty pass (the combined), the AO and few other are with antialias, GlossDir, GlossInd, DiffDir ecc are without antialias. Is it true ? I can’t find this information. My test is very simple, I created a new scene with a sphere with a principled shader with 0 roughness, no metallic, an hdri or a sky generated by Dynamic sky. Am I right? I need to composite the passes out of blender, how can I obtain a clean pass? Thanks a lot!


Some passes are not antialiased and there is a clear reason for this: if they express a certain value for the element this pixel represents, it must present the value “as is”. The color of your sphere does not change towards the edge, so diffuse color pass must have the same value for all pixels that contain the sphere. It goes for color passes, intensity values, all kinds of ID values and so on. I’m not 100% sure, if when more than one object is within the pixel, the value from object closest to camera is used or is it the object with most coverage. I think it is the closest object because it avoids some possible flickering.

To get a clean pass, combine all the passes as appropriate and then premultiply with alpha channel in the end.

Thanks a lot! Masking various passes with the alpha of the “beauty” it works!