Imagine you have a chessboard textured triangle shown in front of you.
Then imagine you move the camera so that you can see the triangle from one side, when it nearly looks as a line.
You will provably see the line as grey, because this is the average color of the texels shown in a straight line from the camera to the end of the triangle. The GPU does this all the time.
Now, how is this implemented? Should I sample every texel in a straight line and average the result to get the same output? Or is there another more efficient way to do this? Maybe using mipmaps?