>>4582814
>IDK where you heard that bullshit, but it's outright false -there were never any extra low-res versions of the textures in the games, and no OpenGL implementation that I know of downscales textures prior to filtering.
You must be really young or something. It's famous that early 3D cards like the first three Voodoo cards had a hard texture limit of 256x256, and also textures with power-of-2 sizes. The OpenGL/MiniGL implementations of software mode games that used higher resolution or textures with unusual sizes/aspect ratios either had to be reduced in resolution or cropped.
GLQuake is the most infamous example, but there are plenty of others.
>Bilinear filtering the fuck out of details could be mistaken for lowering texture resolution, but in actuality, texture res stays the same.
It actually improves the perception of detail because it is similar in principle to supersampling (every bilinear filtered pixel drawn pulls on 4 texels instead of just 1). Check my picture for a good example. You can actually make out the shape of the lava and its finer details, while a lot of that is lost to aliasing in the unfiltered image.
>Example:
Pixel art doesn't filter well because it REQUIRES high contrast to be effective. So this is a deliberately bad example. This is why Doom 64, while still using 2D enemies had them generated from prerendered 3D models, because they have more realistic contrast.
On the other hand, look at how the acid water is improved by bilinear filtering.