Each bitmap image of the mipmap set is a version of the main texture, but at a certain reduced level of detail. Although the main texture would still be used when the view is sufficient to render it in full detail, the renderer will switch to a suitable mipmap image (or in fact, interpolate between the two nearest, if trilinear filtering is activated) when the texture is viewed from a distance or at a small size. Rendering speed increases since the number of texture pixels ("texels") being processed can be much lower than with simple textures. Artifacts are reduced since the mipmap images are effectively already anti-aliased, taking some of the burden off the real-time renderer. Scaling down and up is made more efficient with mipmaps as well.