Texture Filtering

OpenGL provides an interface for loading two-dimensional textures into memory via a function glTexImage2D. However, since this does not provide any filtering, it looks blocky and is rather slow to render. Using the function gluBuild2DMipmaps, mipmaps are generated down to a size of 1x1, which not only makes things look better, it also makes rendering much faster.

glTexImage2D

gluBuild2DMipmaps