For those of you who don t know, mip-mapping is a form of anti-aliasing that is used in many 3D rendering engines. It prevents the well-known interference pattern that occurs on detailed textures, known as the moir?pattern . This happens because when the texture is far enough away, there are more texels (texture pixels) then there are pixels to be rendered on the screen. This means that some texels get skipped over, and visual information is lost.