AF - what does it do?

The question is noobish, I admit.

But still I fail to understand what's the goal of AF ( anisothropic filtering, or anistropic filtering, what's the spelling? ).

How does it improve the picture?

Thanks, Gil.

AF removes the aliasing you get due to textures being rendered at very shallow angles, i.e. running along a wall, you get a "mushy" look to the texture the further along you go.

I have some excellent pics of this in Killbox level for Half-life... will upload in a sec

anisotropic filtering: it set the amount of detail inthe game but for the background, play a car game and use 0x or 1x af and the background is blury then use 8x or 16x af and the background isfine and detailed. 16x takes about 10 fps out of games, if its a racing game. doesnt do much for fps because you cant normaly se that far in the maps. all you goto do is try it, i didnt know what aa and af all ment but i mest around and figured it out.

Ahaha you beat me to it l337 m33p

Ninja fingers

Here are the pics, they will open in separate windows so you can compare:

0xAF, Geforce4 MX440
http://premium.uploadit.org/L337M33P/killbox0000.JPG

4?xAF, Geforce 4 MX440
http://premium.uploadit.org/L337M33P/killbox0009.JPG

16xAF, Radeon 9600XT
http://premium.uploadit.org/L337M33P/killbox0013.JPG