Q:

opengl texture filtering low quality

On my windows machine I see no difference between next settings:
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);

and
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR);

and both are of quite bad quality. Am I missing some settings in pipeline?
And if this is some kind of oddity what are my options to overcome this by the means of 
opengl without using custom scaling?
Don't sure about windows tag. )

A:

For minifictation, you likely want to enable mipmapping. See GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR, otherwise you will get very noticeable aliasing in high frequency textures, when you zoom in more than 2x.
Of course, you need to generate mipmaps, do use this!

