texture distortion at a distance

Question

I produce a strip of quads with texture coordinates to represent a path.

My texture is tiled along these quads.

When the quad is drawn very small (on my integrated Intel chip) it draws distorted.

How can I avoid this?

Answer 1

Try anisotropic filtering. In opengl it should be enabled like this:

GLfloat largest_supported_anisotropy; 
glGetFloatv(GL_MAX_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT, &largest_supported_anisotropy); 
glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT, largest_supported_anisotropy);

Answer 2

As notabene said, anisotropic filtering will help, especially if you combine it with mip-mapping.

Why this works is explained perfectly in this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

"In layman's terms, anisotropic filtering retains the "sharpness" of a texture normally lost by MIP map texture's attempts to avoid aliasing. Anisotropic filtering can therefore be said to maintain crisp texture detail at all viewing orientations while providing fast anti-aliased texture filtering."

On how todo mipmapping in OpenGL see: http://www.swiftless.com/tutorials/opengl/mipmap_generation.html