I've had the same problem you have. I don't think many games are anti-aliased now. You can force the video card to do it but at the expense of speed. I generally don't antialias character sprites. But if you do, I suggest rendering over a dark grey background. Then make the sprites transparent part (the background) black which will leave a dark grey outline around the character, however against most backgrounds it won't be very noticable. If I'm creating a multi-layerd screen with transparentcy I render the layered part against a color that closely matches what its going to be in front of that seems to work quite well. But if your character is going to be in front of many different colors it won't work. It would be nice if we could just anti-alias the inside of the characters, and not the outer edges.