Anisotropic filtering on some ARM GPUs

Unity Engine
1

I was wondering if anyone knows how to deal with ARM GPUs that do not support Anisotropic Filtering?

As some of you may already know, some Mali GPUs on mobile phones do not support Anisotropic Filtering. Link below:

This makes it really annoying for developers since most mobile GPUs on the market already support Anisotropic Filtering and we rely on that. But unfortunately, for some reason, about 30% of mobile GPUs on the market that are ARM do not have this extension. That means developers are forced to create two separate graphics to make their game look good with and without Anisotropic Filtering.

For example, floors in games from a distance greatly benefit from Anisotropic Filtering:

Check out the image on wiki demonstrating this effect. As you can see from a distance the floor looks blurry compare to when Anisotropic Filter is turned on. If you turn off mipmaping to avoid the blurriness, you will end up with a very sharp pixelleted floor that is just as worse.

I am hoping someone here found a work around this? How do you get good looking floors on ARM GPUs? - I am thinking of maybe a special shader will do the trick?

Thanks in advance.

2

You can implement your own anisotropic filtering in shader, but it’ll be much slower than a hardware implementation.

Some hints on how to go about this can be gotten from reading the official spec for the anisotropic filtering extension.
https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/EXT/EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic.txt

You can also try implementing an approximation like TexRam, or Simple Feline, both described here:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-99-1.pdf