Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #727 Joined: [ 10:25 ] [ 12 Nov 2004 ]
Technically mipmap bias and anisotropic filtering are distinct but related things. It can't hurt to try both at the same time, although they'll probably end up being fairly similar.
In short: With mipmapping/trilinear filtering*, your GPU uses smaller versions of a texture, the further away you are from the object. Specifically, it uses four pixels from the one that matches the distance the best, and four from the one that matches second-best, to calculate the total color. With anisotropic filtering, it uses much more pixels (e.g. for 16x anisotropic filtering, 16 times as many). Which pixels are actually chosen depends on the angle at which you're looking at them**.
If you use mipmap bias, then you tell the graphics card to choose different of the smaller textures - specifically with a negative value, you tell it to prefer larger textures. That is useful if a texture is far away but still covers a lot of screen. It's worse for GPU memory bandwidth because you have to access the larger textures more often (it actually takes exactly the same amount of GPU memory). The effect of choosing a larger texture is the same in all directions, so it's less smart than anisotropic filtering.
Yeah, I know, most of you probably don't care, but I find stuff like that fascinating.
*) In practice those are the same, although in theory you can use mipmapping without trilinear filtering. There is no point at all in doing so. **) This is where the name anisotropic comes from: It is not (an-) the same in all directions (-isotropic) of the screen.