It looks like they are using 'alpha to coverage' instead of 'alpha blend' on the hair. Alpha to coverage is faster than alpha blend and you don't have to worry about sorting, but it has some artifacts. More msaa helps minimize the artifacts. They are easy to spot when looking at pics on a pc monitor from close up, but from 10 feet away on a tv the artifacts can be acceptable depending on the game.
That would be my guess. The jpg compression in those screen shots makes it difficult to tell, but I'd say it's 2xAA scaled down from a higher resolution.
For those interested:
Alpha to coverage works by hijacking MSAA. When using alpha blending, the alpha value output by the shader is used to control the blend operation. However with alpha to coverage enabled*, the alpha value is used as a threshold value to specify how many MSAA samples to fill. So, for example, with 4xAA, an alpha value of 0.5 may only fill 2 of the 4 samples. 0.25 may only fill 1, etc.
However, this isn't all - most video cards apply a dither to the threshold, so you get adjacent pixels using slightly differing thresholds. This produces the ugly noise effect. DX 10.1 apparently lets you customize this pattern (see humus' post
here).
The other point, most video cards perform some form of gamma corrected MSAA resolve, so while you may only be filling 2 of the 4 samples, the end result may not appear as exactly 50% due to the approximate gamma curve applied (
this is the curve I once worked out is used by an 8800 for mssa - you can see it's a 4 part linear approximation).
The advantage is you get fake transparency through MSAA resolve, and retain depth testing per msaa sample. The disadvantage is that in the worst case scenario, for a single 2x2 pixel quad, assuming no overdraw, potentially (for 4x msaa) 64 pixels can be processed.
When you use Alpha to coverage, you have to be very careful to keep your alpha high contrast, otherwise performance can tank. Basically, you can get worse-than-supersampling performance from alpha to coverage if you do it wrong.
AtoC is also used for foliage a lot. A lot of racing games used AtoC for car windows. 50% transparent without blending. Etc.
*On some cards you can have both alpha to coverage and alpha blending enabled at the same time.