Its a stat I’ve seen in all video games in the graphics section, along with another filtering one I can’t recall. What does it do?
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It is a post processing step on texture rendering.
Textures are two-dimensional images that give color and a sense of realism to objects. For example, if you have a brick wall in-game, a texture over it might be a two-dimensional photo of an actual brick wall. This gives it color and accentuates when the bricks meet at mortar lines.
Because they are two dimensional, they are most realistically rendered when orthogonal to the camera – ie the brick wall looks best when looking straight at it, perpendicularly (same angle as the photo was taken). It becomes worse when the surface is at a higher angle – ie if looking at the wall on a long hallway. This is because of a differential in resolution and detail required that the texture doesn’t necessarily have, and that your screen can’t necessarily render (there’s a limit to pixel size).
So without filtering of the texture, you’d be able to make out the 2D nature of the texture as well as notice a differential in detail the farther you look. This is also sometimes presented as blurry textures at a distance, with sometimes noticeable cutoff lines.
Anisotropic filtering is a type of processing that takes the textures and massages it at the location/angle it’s meant to be rendered at such that the geometry remains sharp and there’s a smooth transition between textures. In other words this makes your objects look sharper and smoother at all distances and angles.
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