Counter Strike's setting that nobody understands

Texture Filtering is that quiet thing you either ignore or immediately ramp up to AF 16x without thinking. But what does it do, and does it do it? And does it really do it the way you think it does it?
0:00 - Intro to Texture Filtering
1:22 - Bilinear and Trilinear Filtering
1:51 - Anisotropic Filtering
3:13 - Framerate impact tested
4:29 - CS:GO's broken of course
4:59 - CS2
7:13 - Rant about Deus Ex

[Expialidoucious]

Anisotropic filtering is something that no matter the game, I always crank to the highest sestting because it can REALLY make a visual difference, for basically no performance penalty. Some games can look 5 or more years older if you disable it

[Daniel-szgf]

I have used Anisotropic 16x filtering since I got my ATI 9600 Pro back in the mid 2000s. It didn't have much of a performance impact then either.

[XanderNiles]

The effort Philip puts to simplify the explanation of the video settings is very welcoming and highly appreciated. 👍

[TheAsuro]

Small technical addition that Philip likely skipped for brevity:
The right picture at 3:03 is something called RIP-Mapping which doesn't actually get used by most (all?) games. If you look at the VTF files from source games they will only store textures as MIP-Maps (left picture). Instead, when enabling anisotropic filtering, your GPU will automatically pick and combine the relevant pixels from the different MIP-Map levels to give you the correct result.

[The_Viktor_Reznov]

2:30 - it means 16 times the detail

Especially when you look at lightwood laminate

[hawns]

Programmer here.

Bilinear filtering is done via blending a pixel between the same mip map levels (texture LODs)
Trilinear filtering is filtering between two mip levels to then filter between the pixel source and that.
Anisotropic filtering is when you trilinear filter in regards to depth (uses division which is slow at scale).


Texels are a fancy way of saying a pixel with a coordinate on a texture. The way textures are drawn is going from the top left (coordinates for u and v are 0, 0) to the bottom right (where the coordinates are 1, 1). You can interpolate a pixel by getting the u and v coordinates and multiplying it by the texture's height and width, as the uv coordinates almost serve as a ratio to how far in the texture that texel is. This is why MipMaps also work, because it is independent of the size.

Each setting builds on top of the other which is why they are ordered the way they are, and the more steps you do the better the image will look at the end

[Die-Coughman]

Wow! I never actually knew what anisotropic filtering was actually doing except for making textures look better at steep angles and at a distance until this video! An actual explanation of how it works was a welcome surprise! I am curious about the vram implications though due to how many more versions of each texture there are.

[offbrandcereals]

i'd prefer for them to not hide the texture filtering option within the model/texture detail option. additionally, I'd prefer if they gave us two separate options for model and texture detail lol. i've been wanting that for years. why those settings are even combined is a mystery to me.

[-austinfelts]

Now I understand the settings.. slightly more! Thank you Philip! You always explain and show things in a wonderful manner, btw. I always wondered what these magical options did.

[Wulpul]

Philip is one of the few people who could make an eight minute and six seconds long video about texture filtering and have it be interesting and entertaining at the same time.

[micho]

It's a shame to admit but as an 3D Environment Artist with 10y of experience I had very simplified understanding of what texture filtering is, thank you @3kliksphilip :D

[runingman]

Thank you Phillip! I have been whacking this setting up to the max without a second thought about what it is or what it does for nearly two decades because I like big numbers, now I finally know what it has been doing.

[Robot_]

The reason they fixed it in Source 2 is because of VR. There's more looking at objects at weird angles in VR, and you're playing at a lower resolution per eye which is what the texture filtering is tied to, not the total resolution of both eyes. The flaws become much more apparent in VR.

[Bunchiebo]

My internet has been super slow as of the past few days so I had to watch this in 144p. One of the most confusing things to watch when you cant tell any difference between the settings but ill just take your word for it and crank up those settings. Iv usually defaulted to using 2x for "performance" not that I ever tested it

[im]

3kliks is truly the best youtuber. Who else can make you want to watch a 10 minute video about csgo settings?

[foobar]

As far as I recall we make the distinction between "pixels" and "texels" to avoid confusion between the pixels in the actual texture and the pixels occupied by the texture when it is plastered on an object somewhere on your screen. This means you can reason about the performance cost of each filtering type independent of the screen resolution used by the user, or the screen real estate occupied by the object

[donovan]

The reason you can't get anisotropic filtering past 16 times is because It's one of the few things aside from MSAA that is determined by hardware. There's dedicated hardware inside the graphics card to do texture filtering.

Most things you see in game use shaders and our programmable, but for things like texture reads, they can be extremely slow if implemented in software and are used often enough that it's not recommended.

[awgmax]

I identify with that rant at the end of the video so hard. You'd think devs would know graphics settings better than this.

[yurir]

i am always flabergasted at how finely you get to tune AF for how little of an perfomance impact it has. seemingly a selection between of (for super low end pc`s) trilinear and on (meaning 16x AF) would be more than sufficient.

[pao_lumu]

5:00 Phillip... Thank you for doing subtitles on your videos, and thank you even more for having a sense of humor about it.

That two-too swap made me double take, you sly dog ;)