Mipmaps

From DmWiki

Mipmaps (from latin "multum in parvo" or "many things in a small place") are a sets of copies of one texture. Every mipmap is x2 smaller than the one before (e.g. if the original texture was 64x64 then the mipmaps of that texture would be 32x32, 16x16, 8x8, 4x4, 2x2 and 1x1).

Mipmaps are used to gain more performance by altering the texture of an object using different versions of the same texture (mipmaps). When the camera is near an object, the graphics card uses the largest mipmap (usually the original texture) and whan you move away, smaller mipmaps are used. This improves the visual appearance (removing aliasing), and also improves cache coherency.

Mipmapping can sometimes cause textures to be blurred too much. A remedy to this problem is to use anisotropic filtering.

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