Ok, bilinear and trilinear filtering are both texture filtering types that are built to smooth the texels in a texture, taking away the jaggies on the texture''s surface, go play any playstation game, youll immediately see the big fat pixels that are in the texture, bilinear filtering makes it so that the edges are blurred, sampling from more than just that texel in order to calculate the color of that screen pixel (probably didnt make much sense, but if youve seen point vs bilinear filtering it would make sense) and anyways, trilinear is just a step farther, and is considered very good, since the sample area is not square

More to the point, bilinear filtering is a way of antialiasing textures, so they blur together when magnified instead of showing sharp jagged texels. It''s called bilinear because it does it both in u and v directions.

Trilinear is a method of using bilinear on several mip levels, then blending those together. It helps a smooth transition between mip levels.

Anisotropic filtering is a way of compensating for steep view angles of textures. It takes a bunch of samples in the view direction of the texture and blends them. This is good because even for bilinear filtering, steep textures (where one axis has many texels per pixel) you can get aliasing. It''s like a bilinear with view angle compensation.

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