What is texture filtering

Texture filtering decides the visual result in cases when a texel a pixel in a texture is not perfectly aligned with a screen pixel. This happens when you move a graphical element that contains the texture less than a pixel. The following filter methods are available:. The setting for which filtering to use is stored in the Project Settings file. AF can reduce blur and increase detail sharpness at steeper viewing angles.

Anisotropic filtering will take multiple samples per texel to determine the best appearance for the current situation. There will be some delay after submitting a comment. YouTube Channel Tweet Us! By clicking sign up, you agree to receive emails from Techopedia and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Texture filtering is a technique in the field of computer graphics where engineers utilize pixel maps to fill in a particular graphic area. Texture filtering can be done in many different ways. Some techniques use algorithms like nearest neighbor, and others use linear or bilinear filtering, as well as isotropic or anisotropic filtering.

Sophisticated algorithms look at a series of pixels to fill in the gaps or render graphics based on a probabilistic model. By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. This is a difficult concept to grasp, and I have to admit that my analogy does little to explain the actual implementation. If you're interested in more detail, here's Nvidia's explination. Anisotropic filtering isn't common in modern settings menus anymore, but where it does appear, it generally comes in 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x flavors.

Nvidia describes these sample rates as referring to the steepness of the angle the filtering will be applied to:. The difference between these settings is the maximum angle that AF will filter the texture by.

For example: 4x will filter textures at angles twice as steep as 2x, but will still apply standard 2x filtering to textures within the 2x range to optimize performance. There are subjective diminishing returns with the use of higher AF settings because the angles at which they are applied become exponentially rarer.

Anisotropic filtering it's not nearly as much of a hit as anti-aliasing, which is why it rarely appears in menus these days—it's just on, no matter what.