/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5874880
>>5874880
Here's a comparison gallery I made a while back, and no one uses it
https://imgur.com/a/H7uNE

Also every single one of these threads we have posts about filters and how to disable them.

When you have a distant texture on your screen, it is represented by less pixels than there are in the texture.
This causes several pixels of texture (texels) to be represented by a single pixel on your screen.
If you have no filters, then a random texel is selected and with high contrast texture this results in shimmer since the tiniest of movements will cause that choice to shift to a different pixel.
This results in a lot of uncomfortable shimmering on the distant textures, and loss of detail as well since textures turn into mess of random pixels.

In ye olde times low resolutions made pixels constantly shift as you move anyway, so the issue was masked. But if you play at a res higher than 320x240, it begins to show itself.

Mipmapping downscales textures that are shown at the distance preemptively, reducing the choices the algorithm has when deciding on what pixel to show, which results in: 1) Less/no shimmer. 2) Slightly faster drawing since GPU has to operate with lower res textures and 3) Slightly more memory useage to store mipmaps.

Anisotropy is a kind of extra mipmapping that introduces several extra vertical and horizontal downscale slices with shifted perspectives, to display when the texture is shown at high angle to improve the visual clarity. This eats more at the memory, but improves the visual quality considerably. On any system released in the past ~16 years the memory and performance loss is completely neglegible since hardware got optimised to use this technique. In 99.9% cases there is no reason to NOT use x16 Anisotropy.
Anisotropy is a mipmapping technique and will not work if mipmapping is disabled.

Picrelated is a comparison to show what anisotropy does to walls/floors when mipmapping is used.
(cont)