Max Payne 2- What's the diff between...

JEDI

Lifer
Sep 25, 2001
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bilinear, trilinear, and ansitropic filter modes?

How much better does ansitropic suppose to look over trilinear?

Cause i've tried them and i dont see a difference. what is suppose to be the difference?
 

Zugzwang152

Lifer
Oct 30, 2001
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basically anisotropic filtering is making things that are tilted on the z axis look clearer. Think of the scrolling text at the beginning of Star Wars movies... with anisotropic filtering, you could read the text longer as it scrolls up and gets squeezed to nothingness.
 

JEDI

Lifer
Sep 25, 2001
29,391
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arrg..thought i posted this in Video.

Mods- Please move to video forum
 
Jun 18, 2000
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Originally posted by: Zugzwang152
basically anisotropic filtering is making things that are tilted on the z axis look clearer. Think of the scrolling text at the beginning of Star Wars movies... with anisotropic filtering, you could read the text longer as it scrolls up and gets squeezed to nothingness.
^^^ This is probably the easiest explanation one could come up with.

Imagine standing on a street, staring straight ahead toward the horizon. If you look carefully at the ground ahead of you, you will notice "zones" of clarity in the textures. For example, from your feet to about 30 feet ahead the ground looks the most clear and sharp. From 30 ft to 100 ft, the ground looks medium clarity and just a tiny bit sharp. From 100 ft to the horizon, the ground looks like a blurry mess.

Anisotropic filtering removes these "zones" and helps create a smooth transition of texture levels (also known as Mip levels) from your feet to the horizon. Depending on the level of filtering applied, these zones will effectively be pushed back or completely eliminated, resulting in a sharp texture that looks much more realistic.

This is just a common example. It works the same for walls, ceilings, and pretty much everything that isn't perpendicular to your viewpoint. There are nuances from one video card to another, like sample patterns and "tap" levels, that affects overall picture quality, but we don't need to get into that.
 

JEDI

Lifer
Sep 25, 2001
29,391
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I know what ansitropic is. But what's the difference between bilinear/trilinear/anisitropic?

i'm assuming that even 2x anisotropic is better than trilinear?
 
Jan 31, 2002
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Originally posted by: JEDI
I know what ansitropic is. But what's the difference between bilinear/trilinear/anisitropic?

i'm assuming that even 2x anisotropic is better than trilinear?

He just explained it above ... sigh ... :p

Okay.

Bilinear = two detail levels blurred to make a transition.
Trilinear = three ^^^
Anisotropic = "infinite" ^^^

- M4H
 
Jun 18, 2000
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How detailed are you looking for? Anisotropic filtering and bilinear/trilinear are not mutually exclusive. It's possible to enable anisotropic filtering with either bilinear or trilinear (though, that's done in the driver panel, and not all video cards support setting these individually).

For Max Payne 2, any level of aniso will look better than just bi/trilinear filtering. Bilinear looks the worst of the three.
 
Jun 18, 2000
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Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Originally posted by: JEDI
I know what ansitropic is. But what's the difference between bilinear/trilinear/anisitropic?

i'm assuming that even 2x anisotropic is better than trilinear?

He just explained it above ... sigh ... :p

Okay.

Bilinear = two detail levels blurred to make a transition.
Trilinear = three ^^^
Anisotropic = "infinite" ^^^

- M4H
I thought bilinear was 4 texel samples across only a single mip level, while trilinear was 4 samples taken across two mip levels (8 samples total).