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Filter Mode : Point giving me the best quality vs Bilinear & Trilinear
Hello everyone,
So I had a blurry sprite and did a quick search and all posts mentioned to change filter mode to point. However the strange part is that I had a worse quality when set to point and had the best quality when set to trilinear.
Can anyone explain the logic and what each filter is supposed to do?
Answer by sarahnorthway · Mar 30, 2021 at 06:19 PM
As I understand it, these apply to how textures are sampled when they are scaled down:
Point (no filter) aka "nearest neighbor" is by far the fastest. It just takes a single point on the texture with no attempt at smoothing. Pixel art looks better like this, almost everything else looks worse.
Bilinear takes 4 sample points close to the point and blends them together. Hard edges will look blurrier and generally much better.
Trilinear only matters if MipMaps are enabled. MipMaps are pre-downscaled textures made with a high quality algorithm (Box = blurry, Kaiser = sharp). Trilinear filtering takes bilinear samples from two different mipmaps and blends those together.
Aniso is the 4th option; it takes extra trilinear samples, particularly when textures are squished in one dimension, like textures displayed at an angle to the camera, or 9-slice sprites. Aniso level "1" (the default) is off, but can be overridden in quality settings (Anisotropic Textures = Forced On). Aniso level "0" means ALWAYS stay off.