Mipmaps

A floor tiled 160 times runs to the horizon. Sampled full size, its far texels alias into shimmering moiré; mipmapped, each texture carries smaller copies of itself, averaged in linear light, and the far floor samples the copy that matches its size, settling into an even tone. Anisotropic filtering, the default, keeps the checks further toward the horizon: where a pixel covers a long, thin run of texels, it samples along the run at the level its width calls for. The GPU and software renderers sample the same chain.

Step to full size while the camera turns to see the shimmer; supersampling hides it too, at several times the cost. Click the terminal to focus keyboard controls. GPU falls back to software when unavailable. Reload to restart after quitting.