Low-resolution textures?

[Lord]

When I was in bed yesterday evening (just after reading way too many pages of some rendering whitepaper ), I was thinking about texture filtering and I came up with a question I myself couldn't find an answer to.
What do you do when the resolution of the texture you want to use is far lower than the resolution of the output device? Do you just scale it, so that, say, 4 pixels on the screen all get assigned the same texel color? Doesn't that create loads of artifacts?

Until now, I only heard about having more than one texel affect one screen pixel, never less.

Hope I made myself clear enough.

 

[MfA]

That is point upsampling, generally you will use bilinear ... so the only artifact would be blur.

Also :
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=detail-textures&btnG=Search

 

[Anarchist4000]

That's actually a fairly common thing to see because in a game for instance if you're standing right next to an object seldom are the textures of high enough quality where they're still 1:1. Even then when an object is rendered at an angle you really can't match pixels without insanely high resolution textures.

Essentially any time you do a texture lookup you're taking a number of texels and blending between them. You could point sample things but like you mentioned the artifacting would be rather bad in most circumstances.

 

[Blazkowicz]

well, play games from 1997 or a bit later.

 

[Lord]

Essentially any time you do a texture lookup you're taking a number of texels and blending between them.

But how in hell do you blend texel colors if there's not even one texel for each pixel? Is this any kind of nearest neighbour algorithm?

 

[armchair_architect]

It works the same. For each pixel, find the four closest texels to the pixel's texture coordinate, and interpolate between them using fractional distance to each texel.