Which Texture Filtering Quality option do you choose?

He was asking a legitimate question (if YOU don't have anything useful to say, don't respond).

Often times people set things to max without even having a clue what they do. For instance: Maxing anisotropic filtering is far more visually beneficial than maxing antialiasing.

Optimal antialiasing for qualityerformance is 4x. Anything more; you can't tell much of a difference (don't kid yourself here - stills, sure you can see SOME difference, but when you're actually playing you're not going to be scrutinizing edges) and you're taking a big performance hit - anything less and it looks jagged.

As for filtering; quality vs high quality... who wants to post some comparison images? I'm willing to bet there will be very little difference.

 

you call this

a question?

i dont think so. If he would ask normaly it would be like...

IS this important, what doeas it do?
or something like this, but not WTF bla bla...

get my point?

anyway, to stay on Topic...Good idea, need some copmparsion shoots

Lets see, if im home later i go and make some..lets see wheres the Difference, But i can tell u right now that probably u wont notice anything or very very less when only use high quality filtering, its the mix out of different settings that makes Change, like Clamp, AF, AO and so on...like u said allready...

in Need for speed shift u can see very well the difference between Quality AO and medium or off...

Greetz Beta

 

Better Quality for Textures

 

High Quality, All Optimizations Off, 16x AF, 8x Combined AA, SS Transparency...yadayadayada...etc,etc,etc....blah,blah,blah..

 

Depends. If I have plenty of processing power compared to the game, it's HQ, no optimisations all the way.

If the game is a little new, or I am playing it online or something, I'll always turn on all the optimisations.

 

i know that of course.
how better is it? i dont see a difference myself

 

Doesn't use Bilinear or Trilinear filtering.

 

i use high quality. prolly doesn't warrant itself on a gt 240 though...

 

High quality here for me

 

Why should one use quality instead of high quality. It does hardly make any difference in Performance but the textures are much sharper.

 

Is that true? I've always wondered about this. I use a flatscreen 19 LG. (GTX295). So by using high quality in settings i get the best possible textures i can get on the screen without any much performance drop?

 

High performance of course.

 

I use quality cause be enabling this, the other two options can be turned off as its not needed. ansitropic filtering must be X16, can not play game without it, looks like **** and at least 16Xaa multisampling, supersampling is more like it but takes a big hit, big difference in aa quality but a major hit on the gpu.

 

Anisotropic Filtering (Texture Filtering)

It applies to objects in the distance, basically it's the ability to keep the shape of..say a small building or power pole as it gets further and further away. If you use optimizations it will start to lose form and become blurry as it moves away.

It also applies to mipmaps, if an object, say another building example, gets further away and gets smaller, it's using mipmaps, which are smaller clones of itself.
Filtering smooths out the transition between mipmap levels so you can't tell the building is simply being replaced with smaller and smaller versions of itself.
Low Filtering can also reduce the number of distant objects u can see.

Whew..that's a simplified explanation of what AF is used for.

In real terms? If I was playing as a sniper on a map with huge draw distance and and aiming at far away targets, and I do in PR, I can see my target a lot clearer if I use 16xAF than 4xAF

I run 16xAF, but with all optimizations disabled for best quality, and @2048x1536 rez. That's what makes me 1337

 

Ok, i see. Thank you for your reply

 

Actually, that is not what Anisotropic Filtering is for, it gets applied to all texture surfaces, near and far, except those at a certain angle due optimisations to the algorithm, it doesn't reduce the number of distant objects you can see if you don't use it, they'll just look blurrier and not so sharp, which is what AF is, texture sharpening, it reduces blurring and aliasing on textures surfaces.

With mipmapping, you are partly correct, mipmaps are smaller clones of the larger full resolution texture (which saves performance when applying filtering like AF), but the part we are interested in is mipmap blending, which is the transition between mipmap levels, optimisations to drivers, in both Nvidia and AMD cards optimise this transition so you no longer have a smooth gradient between levels, this is what causes the horizontal lines that move away from you as you walk forward in a game like an FPS, turning off these optimisations makes the driver use full Trilinear filtering instead of Bilinear or a mixture of both, sometimes called Brilinear. This is the main optimisation that causes texture crawling or flickering.

 

Texture Filtering does apply to distant objects,so why are you telling me that's not what it's for?
And I can show you an article from tweak guides that shows less filtering applied means less objects in the distance, which kinda contradicts what you're saying, and backs up what I said

Also, it was only meant to be a basic explanation, so if I didn't include every detail does that make me wrong?

Btw LOD can also cause flickering.

 

There doesn't seem to be any visual difference in this example here..

http://www.overclock.net/faqs/107465-info-difference-between-nvidias-quality-performance.html

hah, but this is from 2006..

 

No need to get defensive, i didn't say texture filtering doesn't apply to distant objects, i was trying to explain that it only affects the surface texture of the object, you said:

But AF is only applied to textures, not geometry, AF doesn't help shapes like a small building or pole keep it's shape, it makes the textures covering that pole look sharper, but doesn't effect the geometry itself.

You also said:

Which is not accurate either, mipmaps only effect the texture on the surface of the object, not the object itself, mipmapping uses lower resolution textures as a surface moves away from you or increases the resolution of the texture as you get closer. The object itself, in your example, a building is not affected by this, what makes the object scale down is geometry LOD scaling, which is not related to mipmaps or AF.


Oh and (mipmap) LOD and mipmaps are related, the LOD controls the amount of detail the mipmaps contain, so the mipmap optimisations are basically LOD optimisations, the same thing. Lastly, It's trilinear filtering that helps blend mipmap transitions, not AF, you can use both Trilinear filtering and Anisotropic Filtering at the sametime and are really meant to.

 

OK, fair enough, although I have Trilinear Filtering disabled.