Question about graphics options in games.

A

audiobahn1000

Member
I was looking at the graphics options inside a game and noticed a few things. One option was the texture filter. I could choose from Bilinear, Trilinear or Anisotropic. What’s the difference and what is a texture filter? Also there was an option called a post filter and DXT compression. What is that?
 
The trilinear provides the best texture quality seen on characters and objects in the game itself. If your video cards lacks support for this at higher screen resolutions you would reduce it to the bilinear setting to avoid gaming problems. That mainly has to due with 3D rendering.

The anttistropic and antiliasing settings are generally disabled or set low due to problems where the support for image quality is lacking.
"DirectX Texture Compression


DXTC is the native, compressed texture format used in DirectX 8. In many cases, DXTC reduces texture memory usage by 50% or more over palettized, 8-bit textures, allowing for twice the textures at the same resolution, or the same number of textures at twice the resolution. Three DXTC formats are available." is one explaination seen at http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/TextureSpecifications#DirectX_Texture_Compression
 
PC eye said:
The trilinear provides the best texture quality seen on characters and objects in the game itself. If your video cards lacks support for this at higher screen resolutions you would reduce it to the bilinear setting to avoid gaming problems. That mainly has to due with 3D rendering.

The anttistropic and antiliasing settings are generally disabled or set low due to problems where the support for image quality is lacking.
"DirectX Texture Compression


DXTC is the native, compressed texture format used in DirectX 8. In many cases, DXTC reduces texture memory usage by 50% or more over palettized, 8-bit textures, allowing for twice the textures at the same resolution, or the same number of textures at twice the resolution. Three DXTC formats are available." is one explaination seen at http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/TextureSpecifications#DirectX_Texture_Compression
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Well I cant disable the Anisotropic setting. I have three options. Bi, tri ,or Anisotropic. Is the Anisotropic the best setting? I want to use the absolute best settings possible. My computer can handle it. I have a Radion x1900xt card and it has 512 mb of ram plus I have a Core Two Duo processor and 2gb of Corsair 800 MHz. DDR2 RAM in a dual channel configuration.
 
Anisotropic cleans up the blurring often seen in a game when looking at something in the distance. I always choose the "let application decide" option along with setting the texture to trilinear. Those have always been two different types of settings. It's either bilinear or trilinear for one setting with anisotropic enabled, disabled, or having the option to choose from several level settings.

You still have to experiment there to see which combination of settings sees the best results. It will depend on driver updates and the game itself for this. If everyone had the exact clone of the next person's software as well as hardware environment one combination of settings would be the golden rule.
 
Most graphics can ALLOW up to 16x Anisotropics, I suggest you keep it at Trilinear at worst. It does make a difference!
 
The trilinear provides the best texture quality seen on characters and objects in the game itself. If your video cards lacks support for this at higher screen resolutions you would reduce it to the bilinear setting to avoid gaming problems. That mainly has to due with 3D rendering.
Click to expand...
Now aday's most graphic cards are able to run at least some level of anisotropy. It's less of a performance impact than antialiasing. Bilinear < Trilinear < Anisotropic.

The anttistropic and antiliasing settings are generally disabled or set low due to problems where the support for image quality is lacking.
Click to expand...
Generally more because it will provide crappy performance. My GeForce 4 supported antialiasing, but it gave me crappy peformance. Since you've got a beefy graphics card, you can turn them both on, as they will vastly increase image quality, especialy AA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_filtering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilinear_filtering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering
 
The X1900XT is a newer card. But that doesn't necessarily mean you simply turn everything up. You first find out what works best. The settings vary between games too. Some games don't even include the antiliasing and anisotropic settings. HL2 sees the bilinear/trilinear choice and the reflect world/simple reflections along with a few others like shader settings.
 
I find that anistropic filtering doesnt affect my performance at all, so I usually crank it in all my games. Haha, I'm not even 100% sure what it does.
 
speedyink said:
I find that anistropic filtering doesnt affect my performance at all, so I usually crank it in all my games. Haha, I'm not even 100% sure what it does.
Click to expand...

Anisotropic filtering

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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An illustration of texture filtering methods showing trilinear MIP map texture on the left and enhanced with anisotropic texture filtering on the right. (Click for larger image).


In 3D computer graphics, Anisotropic filtering (AF) 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. Anisotropic filtering is computationally relatively expensive and has only recently become a standard feature of consumer-level graphics cards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

The link was posted earlier by 34erd
 
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