Anisotropic filtering

In 3D computer graphics, anisotropic filtering (abbreviated AF) is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces of computer graphics that are at oblique viewing angles with respect to the camera where the projection of the texture (not the polygon or other primitive on which it is rendered) appears to be non-orthogonal (thus the origin of the word: 'an' for not, 'iso' for same, and 'tropic' from tropism, relating to direction; anisotropic filtering does not filter the same in every direction). In 3D computer graphics, anisotropic filtering (abbreviated AF) is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces of computer graphics that are at oblique viewing angles with respect to the camera where the projection of the texture (not the polygon or other primitive on which it is rendered) appears to be non-orthogonal (thus the origin of the word: 'an' for not, 'iso' for same, and 'tropic' from tropism, relating to direction; anisotropic filtering does not filter the same in every direction). Like bilinear and trilinear filtering, anisotropic filtering eliminates aliasing effects, but improves on these other techniques by reducing blur and preserving detail at extreme viewing angles. Anisotropic filtering is relatively intensive (primarily memory bandwidth and to some degree computationally, though the standard space–time tradeoff rules apply) and only became a standard feature of consumer-level graphics cards in the late 1990s. Anisotropic filtering is now common in modern graphics hardware (and video driver software) and is enabled either by users through driver settings or by graphics applications and video games through programming interfaces. From this point forth, it is assumed the reader is familiar with MIP mapping. If we were to explore a more approximate anisotropic algorithm, RIP mapping, as an extension from MIP mapping, we can understand how anisotropic filtering gains so much texture mapping quality. If we need to texture a horizontal plane which is at an oblique angle to the camera, traditional MIP map minification would give us insufficient horizontal resolution due to the reduction of image frequency in the vertical axis. This is because in MIP mapping each MIP level is isotropic, so a 256 × 256 texture is downsized to a 128 × 128 image, then a 64 × 64 image and so on, so resolution halves on each axis simultaneously, so a MIP map texture probe to an image will always sample an image that is of equal frequency in each axis. Thus, when sampling to avoid aliasing on a high-frequency axis, the other texture axes will be similarly downsampled and therefore potentially blurred. With MIP map anisotropic filtering, in addition to downsampling to 128 × 128, images are also sampled to 256 × 128 and 32 × 128 etc. These anisotropically downsampled images can be probed when the texture-mapped image frequency is different for each texture axis. Therefore, one axis need not blur due to the screen frequency of another axis, and aliasing is still avoided. Unlike more general anisotropic filtering, the MIP mapping described for illustration is limited by only supporting anisotropic probes that are axis-aligned in texture space, so diagonal anisotropy still presents a problem, even though real-use cases of anisotropic texture commonly have such screenspace mappings.