User's Manual

User Guide for Chrome 500 Series Graphics
SG195-A.1 10/20/2008
Page 112
application to specify which level of super-sampling
should be applied. Otherwise, the driver selects an
optimized value. This is the default.
OFF – Select OFF to disable anti-aliasing. Image
quality usually suffers, but performance may
increase because less pixel processing occurs.
2X, 4X, 8X – Select a level to enable optimized
super-sampled anti-aliasing. This will provide
optimized anti-aliasing and still have only a minimal
impact on performance speed.
Anisotropic
filtering
Anisotropic (which means non-uniform shape) filtering is
a filtering technique more advanced than trilinear and is
a technique which is useful for quadrilateral shaped and
angled areas of a texture image. A shaper image is
accomplished by interpolating and filtering multiple
samples from one or more MIP maps to better
approximate very distorted textures. Anisotropic can be
used in conjunction with bilinear or trilinear filtering as
well as MIP map filtering. While trilinear filtering is
capable of producing fine visuals, it only samples from a
square area, which is not the ideal sampling area for all
cases. Anisotropic filtering averages sixteen texture
samples, or taps, in a non-square, rectangular or
parallelogram shaped texture sampling pattern whose
length varies in proportion to the orientation of the
stretch effect. This sampling rate is four times the
sampling level of bilinear filtering and twice the sampling
level of trilinear filtering.
Textures applied to a sloped surface will not look fuzzy,
which is especially useful when rendering shapes with a
high degree of surface tilting in the X-Y-Z planes. Full
use of the anisotropic filtering capabilities may impact
performance.
Setting options include:
By App (default) – Select By App if you want S3
Graphics software to use the anisotropic filtering
level requested by the application. Not all
applications request anisotropic filtering, and S3
Graphics software does not perform anisotropic
filtering unless requested. This is the default.
OFF – Select OFF to force anisotropic filtering to be
always off.
2X – Select 2X to enable anisotropic filtering at its
lowest level. With this setting, 16 texture samples
(taps) selected from a non-square pattern will be
averaged to generate one texture element (texel)