If you are a gamer or even someone who occasionally plays games, you sure would have come across this thing called Anisotropic filtering or ‘AF’ in short. What is it what does this mean in any way? In this article, we are going to look at what is anisotropic filtering and everything you as a gamer should know about it.
Anisotropic filtering is actually a setting in your graphic settings which you should concentrate on. In simple words, Anisotropic filtering increases the clarity of your game? What does clarity mean here? If you disable anisotropic filtering and play games, you can notice that it is a little bit blurry and low grade. The texture level seems to be low and unclear. Now enable anisotropic filtering and you can see that the overall image quality has drastically improved. If you zoom in on the screen, you can see that every nook and corner of the game is more clear and accurate. An overall texture improvement.
Anisotropic filtering affects your frame rate, you get a high frame rate but it comes at a cost. Anisotropic filtering consumes a part of your video RAM to provide such quality frame rates. Without anisotropic filtering, games usually become a bit distorted. But AF actually helps your GPU, how you ask? Normally it is the GPU that has to do all the work like adding details to the game and its scenario but as anisotropic filtering is enabled it absorbs the necessary memory from video memory rather than your GPU. this reduces the overall load of your GPU.
Both bilinear and trilinear filtering are good, but not as good as anisotropic filtering when it comes to adding details to distant images.
What if your game does not have anisotropic filtering in its texture settings?
Some game developers may drop this setting and allow GPU to take the responsibility for everything but you can still use anisotropic filtering. Go to your GPU settings and enable anisotropic filtering manually. This will enable AF in your games too.
Conclusion:
The distant images of your game kinda look blurry? This will be an issue especially if you are a streamer or a professional gamer. That’s where anisotropic filtering comes in to add details to the distant images without compromising on the quality of the graphics. Happy gaming!
