whats so good about anisotropy?

[loosbrew]

hey all...
i just bought a hercules 4500 kyro II with my new system and i want to k now the difference between 2x 4x and all that jazz. i see that when i enable 2x anisotropy that FPS in Serious Sam goes down by almost 80! when i have it disabled or the the setting set to default my FPS are about 110 @ 1024x768x32. but when i turn it to 2x its ~30! so i would like to know what the difference is so that i know what i am loking for and what to appreciate and what not to worry about. i love the card, i have no complaints other than that stupid splash screen, but so far it look absolutley great!

loosbrew

 

[loosbrew]

up

 

[shOOter9]

Aniosotropy is supposed to make the overall image quality better without much of a hit on you FPS.
When I enable it my CS looked sooooooo much better, and I only lost 1 or 2 FPS. I dont know about Serious Sam, maybe it takes a larger hit out of it since the game is much more complicated the HL.

 

[PliotronX]

That isn't anisotropic texture filtering you're enabling, it's Full Scene Anti Aliasing. They're completely different. Aliasing is the stairstep effect made by lower resolutions, often referred to as 'jaggies'. Current FSAA implementations always take a huge performance hit. Anisotropic texture filtering is the technique of making the textures smoove and continuous. Anisotropic filtering on GF2 and GF cards use 8-tap, and can make some scenes look pixelated.