Do I Need Anisotropic Filtering?

Anisotropic Filtering can increase and sharpen the quality of textures on surfaces that appear far away or at odd angles, such as road surfaces or trees. Anisotropic Filtering has a small performance cost (FPS) and can increase image quality in most 3D applications.

Is anisotropic filtering good for performance?

The different types of impact you can see are: Using 2x bilinear AF, instead of trilinear filtering, increases image quality and can also improve performance. Using high levels of max anisotropy can improve image quality, but at the cost of performance.

Does anisotropic filtering use RAM?

Anisotropic filtering is relatively intensive (primarily memory bandwidth and to some degree computationally, though the standard space–time tradeoff rules apply) and only became a standard feature of consumer-level graphics cards in the late 1990s.