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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on May 15, 2002
Manufacturer: Creative Product:
3D
Blaster GeForce4 Ti4400
Search
for 3d
videocards prices.
Much
like the GeForce 3 before it the GeForce 4 Ti supports
anisotropic texture filtering in 16, 32 & 64-tap modes.
Anisotropic texture filtering further helps alleviate
texture aliasing and perhaps most important, it’s
excellent for providing increased texture detail over
greater distances into the foreground as well as at polygons
at sharp angles. The images beneath show the different
filtering modes in action in Combat Flight Simulator 2. Most
noticeably examine the texture detail for the ground (Though
the plane itself is also well worth checking).
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No
Anisotropic
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Level
2 (16-Tap) Anisotropic
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Level
4 (32-Tap) Anisotropic
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Level
8 (64-Tap) Anisotropic
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The
advantages of Anisotropic filtering should be fairly clear
as you can see for yourself, though much like everything
else there can be a frame rate hit to using it. Later on
I’ll examine the effect of each mode at various
resolutions.
That
said, as regards Anisotropic texture filtering one problem
does exist, that being current NVIDIA Drivers do not include
the ability to adjust the filtering mode used, which it does
in OpenGL. In order to enable anisotropic filtering
in Direct3D you have to modify the registry – easy enough
to do with a utility like RivaTuner
which will do it for you.
It’s
a great shame the Display Properties settings for the
Drivers don’t allow you to do this in Direct3D though, as
already shown, the image quality benefits of using it are
excellent. Later on we’ll take a look at the affect on
performance anisotropic filtering has.
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