High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! 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 trade-offs 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.