The LINEAR filter returns the weighted average of the four pixels whose centers are nearest to the sample point. This provides a smooth blending of texel colors when looking at textures close up—it's generally the more desirable effect. This does mean that the graphics hardware has to read four times as many pixels per fragment there is, so naturally, it's slower than NEAREST, but modern graphics hardware is so fast that this is almost never an issue. LINEAR can be used for both the MIN and MAG filters. This filtering mode is also known as bilinear filtering:

Returning to the close-up example image we showed earlier in this chapter, had we used LINEAR filtering, it would have looked like this: