Anisotropic, eh? False advertising, I say!

[Buuri]

What's with the anisotropic filtering anyway? I haven't seen any 3DMark scores here where it would say that it would be something else than "Not supported".

Doesn't it bug you that they are selling their product with false arguments? And that happened with G200 too.

For all I know, that's illegal.


B

[The PIT]

Theres lot of false advertising or misleading. Drifting of the matrox in the UK theres a lot of advertissing for free Internet. BT and barclays do it. In fact it isn't free just the calls you still have to pay per month.
Now is it free internet access because it's an 0800 number you could argue so but since you have to go through that provider and charge a fee for thaqt access you can say it isn't free.
Take the orginal claim the the G200 had opengl support out of the box. In a sense it did by mapping the calls onto d3d. Wether thats proper GL support would take a court case and loads of dosh.
If you really care about it complain to the appropiate poeple they may make them removing the offending article or reword it.

[Maggi]

Nope, Buuri - it's not !

There are at least two kinds of Anisotropic Filtering:

Magnifying and Minifying ... you can check that with 3D Winbench 99.

...........................................

In order to properly support it, Anisotropic Filtering needs to have both the Min and the Max filters enabled. The G400 only supports the Min filters.

I think 3DMark99 MAX either uses both or at least the magnifying filter, which isn't hardware accelerated on the G400, thus it is 'unsupported' ...

..........................................

On the G200 it was supported via software up to PD4.26 ... it was dumped for reasons that I don't know, but I guess it took too much of a performance hit.

...

Go grab yourself 3D Winbench 99 and have a look for yourself



------------------
Cheers,
Maggi

Asus P2B-S @ 112MHz FSB - Bios 1009 final
Celeron300A @ 504Mhz
128MB 7ns SDRAM
G400 DualHead 32MB SGRAM @ 201 MHz memory clock

I'll be on holiday for the coming three weeks and I miss you folks already ;-)

[Buuri]

What is it good for without magnifying then?

When a texture has to be magnified, it's not going to be filtered at all? So it's then just made of 'larger pixels'?

Sounds like really useful implementation to me..


B

[Maggi]

at least it uses triliniear mipmapping ...

------------------
Cheers,
Maggi

Asus P2B-S @ 112MHz FSB - Bios 1009 final
Celeron300A @ 504Mhz
128MB 7ns SDRAM
G400 DualHead 32MB SGRAM @ 201 MHz memory clock

I'll be on holiday for the coming three weeks and I miss you folks already ;-)

[bertrik]

Can someone enlighten me on this subject?
What is anisotropic filtering?

------------------
Celeron333@416 on Chaintech 6BTM, 8MB G200 SDRAM

[Buuri]

Filtering is used to produce a texture on screen. That has to be done to fit the texture on the polygon.

Anisotropic filtering is beyond bi- and tri-linear because it actually takes the textures color in account. So it won't smudge edges with high contrast, etc.


B

[rubank]

So the bottom line is:

G400 doesn´t really support anisotropic filtering.

When I first read Maggi´s explanation, a couple of weeks ago in another thread where I put the same question, I thought it was the other way around: G400 full support but not 3DMark.

I guess my suspicions were more justified than I thought at the time.

Shame on Matrox.

rubank

[Maggi]

Sorry Rubank, if my explanation wasn't clear enough back then ...


------------------
Cheers,
Maggi

Asus P2B-S @ 112MHz FSB - Bios 1009 final
Celeron300A @ 504Mhz
128MB 7ns SDRAM
G400 DualHead 32MB SGRAM @ 201 MHz memory clock

I'll be on holiday for the coming three weeks and I miss you folks already ;-)

[SlurpDog]

It really isn't that big a deal. No card on the market properly supports anisotropic filtering. Many claim to, but it's either a hack (TNT2) or not fully there (G400). It's still too much of a performance killer for companies to really implement it.



------------------
Celeron 333@416, 192MB, SBLive!, 32MB G400, 12MB Voodoo2, and growing every day.

[Buuri]

But the thing is that if anisotropic filtering would be implemented and used, textures wouldn't have to be nearly as big and it would still look good.

If you take it that way, it might be even faster.


B

[franksch4]

The current problems with trilinear and bilinear filtering is that it uses a small mipmap for a polygon under a big angle (like floors and ceilings). That's why those textures look blurry even if they aren't that distant.

Anisotropic takes in account that angle. That's why those kind of polygons look much more detailed.

But anisotropic filtering won't (really) help for magnifying a texture. So we still need big textures.

Frank