What exactly does they mean...

[ionicsachin]

I am a die hard Far Cry fan. I just wanted to know what does anistropic filtering mean.

[freshseasons]

Anisotropic filtering is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces that are far away and steeply angled with respect to the camera.
So you see those distant objects like skyline ...trees in FARCRY. Well they are not blurred when Anisotropic filtering is on. Both ATI and nVidia use it in different forms.
Even Anisotropic filtering greatly enhances the details we see in the objects.

[QwertyManiac]

Exaxctly.

Originally Posted by wiki

In 3D computer graphics, anisotropic filtering (AF) is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces that are far away and steeply angled with respect to the camera. Like bilinear and trilinear filtering it eliminates aliasing effects, but introduces less blur in the process and thus preserves more detail. Anisotropic filtering is computationally relatively expensive and has only recently become a standard feature of consumer-level graphics cards.

More More More - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering (With pictures)