Friday, June 1, 2007

Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering Explained

These are advanced techniques used to improve the image quality of 3D graphics. But what exactly are they, and how do they work?This is to give you a basic understand of what AA (antialiasing) and AF (anistropic filtering) are, and why you should care about them.

To avoid confusion, we have simplified explanations in several areas and made a few generalizations. We have also chosen to avoid performance benchmarks or comparisons of various AA and AF modes on competing graphics cards. All that stuff is useful, and we'll tackle it in time, but we think it's important that our readers have a basic understanding of the techniques before diving down too deeply into specifics.

Antialiasing—the Anti-jaggies

Let's start with AA (antialiasing). The name is sort of self-explanatory, as long as you know what aliasing is. Dictionary.com defines aliasing as a "jagged, stairstep effect on curved or diagonal lines that are reproduced in low resolution, as on a computer printout or display." In truth, "aliasing" as a general term can often be applied to all sorts of sample-based situations, like digital audio. For graphics, the dictionary.com definition suits us just fine.

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