A method, graphics processing unit, and system are described herein. The method for adaptive anisotropic filtering includes calculating a number of ways of anisotropy based on a computed level of detail of a texture map and applying a bilinear low pass filter to a texture map's closest two MIP maps using a processor. An effective number of ways and filter sizes may be computed on each of the closest two closest MIP maps. Additionally, the closest two MIP maps may be sampled at their respective effective number of ways. The method also includes applying a corresponding sized low pass filters to each of the closest two MIP maps, and combining the filtered closest two MIP maps using a weighted sum based on a fractional part of a computed level of detail.