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What is anisotropic filtering?

I

isamu

OMFG HOLY MOTHER OF MARY IN HEAVEN I CANT BELIEVE IT WTF WHERE ARE MY SEDATIVES AAAAHHH
Can anyone explain to me the effects and advantages of anisotropic filtering? What does it do to the image to enhance the quality? I've tried playing around with different "x" settings in Trackmania Sunrise and to me I don't really notice a difference. Can someone post a couple screenies, one with anisotropic filtering completely disabled, and one with it turned up to the max? I currently have my settings at x8.

What anisotropic filtering settings do you use while playing your PC games?
 
You know that vaseline blur that comes after a few metres/feet in 3d games as you look to the horizon? It pushes that back.
 
Hehehe we have a whole new generation of buzzwords coming up. :) Anistropic filtering, displacement mapping, procedural synthesis, HDR lighting....someone should do an FAQ with some deffinitions and explanations. I would but I'm not up to it at the moment.
 
jimbo said:
Hehehe we have a whole new generation of buzzwords coming up. :) Anistropic filtering, displacement mapping, procedural synthesis, HDR lighting....someone should do an FAQ with some deffinitions and explanations. I would but I'm not up to it at the moment.
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None of this is new ...

edit: Oh forget it, I'd rather not argue the fact. I don't even know how to delete this post. :(
 
blackadde said:
None of this is new ...

edit: Oh forget it, I'd rather not argue the fact. I don't even know how to delete this post. :(
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yeah, but we just started seeing some of this in PC games recently... and some of it is new to the console world.
 
Monk said:
You know that vaseline blur that comes after a few metres/feet in 3d games as you look to the horizon? It pushes that back.
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:lol :lol That's the simplest, most perfect explanation ever!!!
 
It keeps textures nice and sharp without making them looking like a shimmering mess (like when no filtering is used in ps2 games). I'm seeing a disturbing lack of anisotropic filtering in xbox 360 shots (it has more than enough power to do it).
 
Monk said:
As i understand it, it's just the technical term for bloom lighting.
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Umm. no.

High Dynamic Range color...

in otherwords, it's a more natural and accurate color reproduction of the massive color values the human eye can percieve.

in tangible terms, you should be able to see more detail in black areas, and not have bright bright whites wash out everything around it completely (comparatively).
 
Zaptruder said:
Umm. no.

High Dynamic Range color...

in otherwords, it's a more natural and accurate color reproduction of the massive color values the human eye can percieve.

in tangible terms, you should be able to see more detail in black areas, and not have bright bright whites wash out everything around it completely (comparatively).
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Yeah ... some scenes in reality can contain up to 1,000,000:1 contrast ratios, but most games typically use only 8-bit precision (256 levels) for lighting. HDR sort of fixes this.

edit: http://www.ict.usc.edu/~jcohen/hdrtm.html
 
plus, HDR can recreate that thing where if you are outside for a while in the sun, then run to an indoor environment everything looks pitch black until your "eyes" adjust.. and similarly if you are in a dark environment and walk into the sun it seems like the sky is on fire for a few seconds. Really cool effects were done with one of the far cry patches.
 
blackadde said:
Ansio removes that horrible blurry mess caused by bi/tri mip-mapping on your textures.

2x ansio:
http://www.thinktechie.com/reviews/04-2002/Radeon8500/no_smoot_2x_ansio.jpg

16x ansio (6x aa as well)
http://www.thinktechie.com/reviews/04-2002/Radeon8500/perf_6x_an16x.jpg

IMO it's more important than AA. I try to keep mine ~8x.
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But isnt the blurryness caused by AA? When does AA start becoming unnoticeable in the higher settings? Would the image for example, look just as good with AA at 2, as it would at 8?
 
isamu said:
But isnt the blurryness caused by AA? When does AA start becoming unnoticeable in the higher settings? Would the image for example, look just as good with AA at 2, as it would at 8?
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AA just smoothes out polygon edges (jaggies along the edges of things). AA has nothing to do with the textures.
 
isamu said:
But isnt the blurryness caused by AA? When does AA start becoming unnoticeable in the higher settings? Would the image for example, look just as good with AA at 2, as it would at 8?
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I think you might be confusing the two here.

AA doesn't really cause blurry textures, it's just an attempt to reduce aliased polygon edges ('jaggies'). Depending on how it's implemented, texture sharpness can take a mild hit though; supersampling the entire image (rendering at a higher resolution and then using some algorithm to reduce the image for output to your monitor) or multi-sampling (just focusing on the edges of polygons). Anyways thats a little off course.

Higher AA always better. Dimishing returns depend a lot on the scene being rendered alongside the observer's eyesight, so I can't really answer that for you. For me, 4x AA most of the time is fine.
 
Thanks for the explanation. So let me ask you this....what ususally causes the framerate to take a dip the most....higher resolution? Higher AA settings? Higher Anisotropic settings? Higher PC shader settings?
 
isamu said:
Thanks for the explanation. So let me ask you this....what ususally causes the framerate to take a dip the most....higher resolution? Higher AA settings? Higher Anisotropic settings? Higher PC shader settings?
Click to expand...

It depends a lot on the particular silicon pushing the polygons and effects, the game engine beind used, the scene it's trying to render, the efficiency of the drivers, etc. For example, a lot of newer chips have well designed hardware dedicated to speeding up AA, wheras it used to be a massive performance hit.

Anyways, I think *typically* on new hardware higher resolutions drag performance down more so than the relative benefits of higher AA/AF ... to an extent. Of course this depends on how much video RAM is available, what API is being used, all that jazz. Sort of a non-answer I guess, IMO it's a case by case thing most of the time.
 
here isamu


this is taken off my pc, no change in resolution, or any texture detail



compare.jpg




only setting changed was going from trilinear to 16x AF


notice the increase in the ground texture "detail"
 
Yeah, I think the 5200 FX is the lowest Nvidia card that supports Pixel Shader 2.0. Dont feel too bad, that demo will even bring 6800U's to their knees at high resolutions (hence the 640x480 res in window mode as the default).
 
Thanks for those samples.

OK so lets talk resolution...would running a typical racing game at 800x600, but with AA and AF turned up to max, look noticeably inferior than at 1024x768? How much is resolution is issue with the overall image quality?

How many of you are satisfied with running your PC games at 800x600, if it means maintaining a framerate always above 60?
 
Well, the higher your resolution, the better the job that the AA/AF can do. At 640x480, there's only so much that can be done because your pixels are fricken ginormous. Eventually you'll hit diminishing returns--this is going to be determined by the quality and size of your display, so there's no way to say how much difference you'll see between 800x600 full AA/AF and 1024x768. 800x600 would be fine for a 15" or lower monitor, but anything 17" or higher you'd probably want at least 1024x768.

Nathan
 
TheDiave said:
Those two screen grabs look exactly the same to me... Guess I don't have that good of an eye.
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Notice the cleaner textures in the mid to background (AF) of the second pic as well as the smoother edges on the gun and the tower (AA) in the same pic.
 
Heh, lack of aniso is so much more annoying to me than lack of AA. It is something much more noticeable when you play.
 
aoi tsuki said:
Notice the cleaner textures in the mid to background (AF) of the second pic as well as the smoother edges on the gun and the tower (AA) in the same pic.
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It's just too subtle for me to notice. It ranks up there with all the jaggy talk when the PS2 first came out (in Japan). If you were spending time staring -- trying to see edges -- playing Tekken Tag, then you obviously weren't playing.
 
Is the 'texture filtering' setting in BF2 anisotropic filtering? and AA is polygon edge filtering?

I wish they'd use one term.


For the specific example of BF2, what are peoples experiences of AA/Anis? Is the engine more forgiving of one? I'm running a 128MB 6600GT, so I'm concious of not wanting to waste what little RAM I have.

Oh, and I'd like to run close to 1280x1024 as I have an LCD monitor with shitty scaling. (do these things have a decent secondary resolution usually?)
 
jimbo said:
Hehehe we have a whole new generation of buzzwords coming up. :) Anistropic filtering, displacement mapping, procedural synthesis, HDR lighting....someone should do an FAQ with some deffinitions and explanations. I would but I'm not up to it at the moment.
Click to expand...

Not new in the PC world. Far Cry uses almost all of that (excluding procedural s.) and it's a 1.5 year old game.

Anisotropic filtering is ancient, get your facts straight.
 
mrklaw said:
Oh, and I'd like to run close to 1280x1024 as I have an LCD monitor with shitty scaling. (do these things have a decent secondary resolution usually?)
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No very often. Other than 1280x1024, your only options for proper pixel ratios are 640x512 and, uh, 320x256. Basically everything else is going to give you muddy interpolation.
 
The best example I can think of of anisotropic filtering is in Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast. In The Lost World level, there were rotating textured cubes - if you watch them rotate, as the angle of the surfaces becomes more shallow from the player's perspective, the textures are reduced to prevent them shimmering. Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath also uses the technique.
 
TheDiave said:
It's just too subtle for me to notice. It ranks up there with all the jaggy talk when the PS2 first came out (in Japan). If you were spending time staring -- trying to see edges -- playing Tekken Tag, then you obviously weren't playing.
Click to expand...
Wow, even after looking at the CS:S pics above? Those look dramatically different to me.
 
Kid Chameleon said:
The best example I can think of of anisotropic filtering is in PSO on Dreamcast.
Click to expand...

fixed for truth. That game had about 5 feet around the player where you could see good textures and everything else on the ground was a big blurry mess.
 
>>>The best example I can think of of anisotropic filtering is in PSO on Dreamcast.<<<

I think the only aniso on DC was in Test Drive: Le Mans.
 
Kid Chameleon said:
The best example I can think of of anisotropic filtering is in Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast. In The Lost World level, there were rotating textured cubes - if you watch them rotate, as the angle of the surfaces becomes more shallow from the player's perspective, the textures are reduced to prevent them shimmering. Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath also uses the technique.
Click to expand...

Neither of those games have anisotropic filtering. Anisotropic tries to keep the texture sharp regardless of the angle or distance of the texture (depending on the settings). What you are describing is just mip mapping (textures being reduced to prevent shimmering).
 
God's Hand said:
You're honestly okay with being ignorant? You can see the difference, don't be stupid.
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LOL Mr. Hand puttin the shmack down! :lol
 
Taken from Wikipedia.com:

In 3D computer graphics, anisotropic filtering is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces that are far away and steeply angled with respect to the camera. Like bilinear and trilinear filtering it eliminates aliasing effects, but introduces less blur in the process and thus preserves more detail.
Click to expand...
 
mrklaw said:
Oh, and I'd like to run close to 1280x1024 as I have an LCD monitor with shitty scaling. (do these things have a decent secondary resolution usually?)
Click to expand...

Both ATI (and especially) NVIDIA drivers can take over scaling. I play BF2 at 1280x960 letterboxed on my 1280x1024 LCD thanks to ATI drivers.
 
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