In games, you can find an anisotropic filtering settings. AMD and NVIDIA drivers indicate that anisotropic texture filtering affects texture clarity. More specifically, it increases the clarity of textures and reduces the level of graphic noise or glare.
This article will explain what anisotropic filtering is in games. You can enable and adjust its level. A high degree of anisotropy improves the quality of texture display at the expense of a certain percentage of performance (in simple words, it increases the clarity of textures).
What is Anisotropic Filtering
Directly anisotropic filtering is the highest-quality method for processing overlaid textures in games. Unlike isotropic types of filtering (for example, bilinear or trilinear), not circular, but elliptical interpolation is used.
An ellipse is created by the projection of a circle, which is a separate pixel of the monitor, the processed “polygon”. The degree of filtration is measured by the ratio. The number of texels of two levels for interpolation is determined by its multiplicity (2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x).
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It is quite hardware demanding and can be set at different levels to improve graphics or performance. In theory, fewer filtered pixels translates into less overhead.
How to enable anisotropic filtering
From the desktop context menu, select Radeon Settings (or AMD Radeon Software ). Under Settings> Graphics Card, find Anisotropics Filtering. Drag its slider to the On position and select the Filtering Level (2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x).
enable anisotropics filtering
Open NVIDIA Control Panel> 3D Settings> Manage 3D Settings . In the list of global parameters (or separately for each application), change the Anisotropics filtering value . By default, Application Control is selected .
Manage 3D Settings
Important! According to AMD, the function increases the clarity of textures and reduces the level of graphics noise. It also only affects DirectX 9 applications (we no longer need it).
Conclusion
Anisotropics filtering is a texture filtering process that takes into account the stretched image of a pixel in the texture. Instead of a square filter (as in bilinear filtering), an elongated filter is used, which allows you to better select the desired color for a pixel.
Which filtration is best . It all depends on your components and applications. In some applications, anisotropics filterings will suit you, in others trilinear filtering. You can test it with your game. By default, developers can use it.
Among the disadvantages: the implementation of anisotropic filterings is rather complicated and when enabled, the rendering speed drops significantly. The higher (higher) the level of filtering, the more “elongated” pixel images can be correctly processed and the better the quality will be.