Texture Mapping - enable this option to display textures (artwork, material textures etc) within 3D scenes.
The following filtering options improve the display of textures by minimising blurring, shimmering & blocking effects.
Bilinear filtering - reduces blockiness when on-screen polygons are scaled.
3D Scene before & after Bilinear Filtering has been applied
Mip-mapping - increases rendering speed & reduces jaggedness by using a hi-resolution image of a texture when an object is viewed from a close-up and a low-resolution image of the same texture when the same object is viewed from afar. Mip-mapping helps to combat Moire patterns, and should be enabled wherever possible to prevent reflective models and mesh objects from looking over-glossy.
3D Scene before & after Mipmapping has been applied
Trilinear filtering - changes in viewing distance can result in a noticeable jump as different texture resolutions (Mipmaps) are deployed. Trilinear filtering provides additional smoothing by interpolating between Mipmaps.
3D Scene with Bilinear and Bilinear & Trilinear Filtering
Anisotropic filtering - reduces blurriness and preserves texture detail at extreme viewing angles.
3D Scene before & after Anisotropic Filtering has been applied.
Max. Texture Size - this option allows you to specify the resolution of on-screen textures. Higher values will give improved detail, but you may notice slower response time. Lower values will give a quicker response at the expense of texture detail.
3D Scene with 256 pixels & 8192 pixels Maximum Texture Size.