Texture Filtering Quality
Here's some sample filtering outputs from SS:SE...
Looking at the screenshots there appears to be few surprises in the output of Parhelia's filtering options available. We can see that Trilinear filtering is blending the mipmaps in a fashion that's representative of a normal Trilinear filtering implementation and we can also see Matrox have implemented curved boundaries. One thing that can be seen on the Bilinear shots is a slight 'dirtiness' between the mipmap boundaries.
Let's take another look at the filtering methods used with "samX"'s Anisotropic Filtering Test application.
From the Bilinear shot we can see the 'noise' of the mipmap boundary is quite pronounced, though oddly it appears to be worse in the lower half of the screen than it is in the upper half. The Trilinear shot shows that Trilinear filtering also has the same characteristics, yet it's a little less obvious because the mipmap boundaries are being merged into one another.
Both the 2X Anisotropic filtering shots show that Anisotropic filtering appears to be calculated uniformly, with no angles appearing to be worse case. Oddly, though, on the Trilinear shot there does appear to be areas around the 45 degree angles where the Anisotropic filtering starts a little late, leaving some slight traces of mipmapping where we wouldn't expect it.
