Anisotropic Filtering in Unreal

Following the question MipMap level drops too quickly on steep view angle, causing noticable blurry textures

Aniso filtering has no visible effect and I suspect is simply not working, checked via RenderDoc.

r.MaxAnisotropic settings has no visible difference on textures. I’m pretty sure anisotropic filtering simply isn’t working in my projects.
Intended and working effect can be found here:

The following image is after setting r.MaxAnisotropy to 64 in both Scalability.ini, console and blueprint. See how the lines gets blurry. Clearly the aniso filtering isn’t working it’s magic.

As documented here only setting ‘Filter’ option in texture asset to Default, and texture group to a group that enables aniso filtering, would it be working.
I’ve verified in 5.4’s BaseDeviceProfiles.ini that “World” texture group has aniso filtering enabled:

Interestingly, if the texturesampler in material graph has “Sampler Source” set to “Shared: Wrap” option, which SHOULD get filter mode from the world texture group, which we’ve verified last step has aniso filtering enabled. But when I capture it in RenderDoc, the shader uses a MaterialTextureBilinearWrapedSampler. Which implies world texture group uses bilinear filtering??


I’ve tried every other texture groups but obviously they all appear to have the same effect. Almost all of them should has aniso filtering enabled.

I’ve resolved it while writing this post. In Nvidia control panel, make sure that Anisotropic filtering is enabled. On my machine it’s defaulted to disabled for some reason.

Still leaving the full investigation if anybody encountered the same issue, also getting to understand how Unreal manages texture is pretty fun. Hopefully this will help somebody!