Can you define these terms for me?

What do these words mean and what effects do they have on graphics?

1. Anti-Aliasing
2. V-Sync
3. Texture Filtering
4. Anisotropic Filtering (spelling?)
5. Bloom

Thanks in advance.

 

www.google.com

 

LOL +rep. But I do say www.wikipedia.com is better. To the OP: I'm sure you mean no harm, but I could write an encyclopedia on those terms. They're just way too broad and a little complex.

 

I still don't understand what vertical sync is... I don't understand texture filtering either, does it just blend the textures? Isn't that what anti-aliasing does? Doesn't bloom also blurs and blends?

 

No, no ... THIS is the best! If you use it you don't have to worry about what is accurate or correct, just know that everything on there is wrong!

 

Smooths the edges between polygons. It doesn't touch what's inside the polygon, only the edges.

A term that only really makes sense on CRT monitors.
V-Sync = Vertical Sync
A CRT monitor draws the screen one line at a time, from top to bottom.
When it reaches the bottom, it pauses for a moment, while the electron gun is pointed up to the top again.
If you have v-sync enabled, then that is the only time at which a new frame may be presented to the monitor. Then the monitor gets the whole frame, and can render it in peace, knowing that the GPU won't give it a new frame until it's done.
With it disabled, the GPU can literally overwrite the frame data while the monitor is drawing it. So you can easily end up with the top half of the screen showing a different (older) frame than the bottom half. That can lead to tearing, and v-sync avoids that.
Of course, v-sync forces the GPU to stop and wait, so it limits your framerate. (It never gets higher than the screen's refresh rate, and if it dips below, then it has to skip a screen refresh, and wait for the next one before it can get to present the frame it's working on. Then you get a framerate of half the screen's refresh rate. And if that's not enough, then a quarter.)
The actual feature still makes sense on LCD's, but the name is derived from how CRT monitors work.

Smoothes textures out.
A texture only has a limited resolution. If it's mapped onto a big polygon close to the camera, then the number of pixels showing the texture on the screen might be larger than the number of pixels in the original texture. So obviously, it has to be smoothed out a bit.

As far as I know, basically applies a kind of perspective correction to reduce blurring on the far edges of polygons almost parallel with the viewing angle (like if you're looking along a runway, or up at a tall building)

Just a shader effect that emphasises light areas to give the scene more of a shine.
Best shown with an example, really

Guild Wars would be a good example of a game that uses bloom somewhat tastefully. There, it's simply used to highlight characters and special landscape features and such.

 

1. Anti-Aliasing-digital signal processing, anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphics, digital audio, and many other domains.

In the image domain, aliasing artifacts can appear as wavy lines or bands, or moiré patterns, or popping, strobing, or as unwanted sparkling; in the sound domain, as rough, inharmonic, or spurious tones, or as noise.

Anti-aliasing means removing signal components that have a higher frequency than is able to be properly resolved by the recording (or sampling) device. This removal is done before (re-)sampling at a lower resolution. When sampling is performed without removing this part of the signal, it causes undesirable artifacts such as the black-and-white noise near the top of figure 1-a.

In signal acquisition and audio, anti-aliasing is often done using an analog anti-aliasing filter to remove the out-of-band component of the input signal prior to sampling with an analog-to-digital converter. In digital photography, optical anti-aliasing filters are made of birefringent materials, and smooth the signal in the spatial optical domain. The anti-aliasing filter essentially blurs the image slightly in order to reduce resolution to below the limit of the digital sensor (the larger the pixel pitch, the lower the achievable resolution at the sensor level).

2. V-Sync- Vertical synchronization (v-sync, vbl-sync) refers generally to the synchronization of frame changes with the vertical blanking interval. Since CRTs were nearly the only common video display technology prior to the widespread adoption of LCDs, the framebuffers in computer computer graphics hardware are designed to match the CRT characteristic of drawing images from the top down a line at a time by replacing the data of the previous frame in the buffer with that of the next frame in a similar fashion. When the display requests current contents of the framebuffer before the current frame is done being written on top of the previous one, the framebuffer gives it the current mishmash of both frames, producing a page tearing artifact partway down the image.

Vertical synchronization eliminates this by timing framebuffer fills to coincide with the display's data requests, thus ensuring that only whole frames are seen onscreen.

Computer games and other advanced programs often allow vertical synchronization as an option, but it is sometimes disabled because it often has the effect of hampering performance on slower hardware (and/or in programs that were not adequately designed for v-synced operation) to the point where framerates drop below that of the display hardware.

3. Texture Filtering- In computer graphics, texture filtering is the method used to determine the texture color for a texture mapped pixel, using the colors of nearby texels (pixels of the texture). In short, it blends the texture pixels together by breaking them up into tinier pixels. Another term for texture filtering is called texture smoothing. There are many methods of texture filtering, which make different tradeoffs between computational complexity and image quality. Since texture filtering is an attempt to find a value at some point given a set of discrete samples at nearby points, it is a form of interpolation.

4. Anisotropic Filtering (spelling?)- In 3D computer graphics, anisotropic filtering (abbreviated AF) is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces that are at oblique viewing angles with respect to the camera where the projection of the texture (not the polygon or other primitive it is rendered on) appears to be non orthogonal. Like bilinear and trilinear filtering it eliminates aliasing effects, but introduces less blur at extreme viewing angles and thus preserves more detail. Anisotropic filtering is relatively expensive (usually computationally, though the standard space-time tradeoff rules apply) and only became a standard feature of consumer-level graphics cards in the 1990s.

sample image of Anisotropic filtering-


5. Bloom-Bloom (sometimes referred to as light bloom) is a computer graphics effect used in computer games and high dynamic range rendering (HDR) to reproduce an imaging artifact of real-world cameras. The effect produces fringes (or feathers) of light around very bright objects in an image.

known as the "Shader Effect"

 

Anti-Aliasing - Unlike normal AA where intermediate values are used to smooth things out, in games this is actually "Full Screen Anti-Aliasing" where each pixel is rendered in more detail and then scaled down. This makes lines in-game appear smooth depending on how much AA you apply, but it reduces your FPS (especially with less or slow video memory).

V-Sync - Each frame is synced to your monitor's "frame" to make sure there's no inconsistencies that will result in weird "tearing" effects. However, this means the computer will wait before drawing the next frame, reducing your FPS. Enable for a cleaner looking game.

Texture Filtering - Without this on (AF), textures on any surface besides the one you're looking straight on will seem blurry and odd, especially at a low resolution relative to the size of the textures. Enabling this will reduce FPS, but will make surfaces look much better. (Bilinear is crap, trilinear is a lot better, but AF 2x-8x are better than both).

Anisotropic Filtering (spelling?) - See Texture filtering.

Bloom - Makes the sun really bright compared to leaving this option off. The real deal, however, is "high dynamic range." HDR doesn't just make the sun give off a corona, it actually makes dark spots really dark, and bright spots blindingly bright. However, both reduce FPS when enabled. Bloom requires a DirectX 8 card, while HDR requires a DirectX 9 SM2 (Half-Life 2-based games), or DirectX 9 SM3 card.

 

Damn it! I want those 30 min of my life back. Thanks for raising my blood pressure and taking 20 secs out of my life expectancy.

 

Big thanks to Jalf, Howie, and Dave! Thanks guys!

 

Anytime AmazingGracePlayer!

Now..for my reward...play me Amazing Grace! :laugh:

 

There ya go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEyEu-hS0fA