🔗 Anisotropic Filtering

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer graphics

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.