In computer graphics, texture filtering or texture smoothing is the method used to determine the texture color for a texture mapped pixel, using the colors of nearby texels (pixels of the texture). Mathematically, texture filtering is a type of anti-aliasing (AA), but it filters out high frequencies from the texture fill whereas other AA techniques generally focus on geometric edges. Put simply, it allows a texture to be applied at many different shapes, sizes and angles while minimizing blurriness, shimmering and blocking. As of 2016, it is most commonly performed by dedicated hardware (texture sampling units in graphics processing units).