PSX vs N64 graphical look

[L. Scofield]

What do you guys think? I'm not posting screenshots/videos because either they're emulated and therefore not useful or come from an analog capture recorder and therefore worthless.

This is for those who actually spent some time with those systems.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I won't vote because I never used a N64 once but did it suffer the infamous PlayStation texture warping issue, or was this unique to Sony's 3D implementation?

 

[L. Scofield]

The N64 games didn't suffer from that.

 

[Goodtwin]

PSX games are a mess. Going back and playing games on PSX is painful. Early N64 games were all really low res, but the texture quality was far superior to that on PSX. A lot of later N64 games also supported 480p, games like NFL Quarterback Club and All Star Baseball look leaps and bounds better than anything on the PSX. Ironically I have a PSX under my TV and like a moron sold my N64. I bought most of my favorite N64 games on the Wii, but it was still dumb to get rid of my N64. The N64 expansion pak also allowed for games like Turok Seeds of Evil to run in native 480p, and that was a sharp looking game for its time.

 

[jlippo]

N64.
Lack of decent quality mipmapping/texture filtering , sub-pixel precision and perspective correction is just bad combination.

 

[Grall]

PSX games in general had higher frame rates, more detailed geometry and higher resolution textures compared to N64, although things like perspective correct texturemapping and, in some games, actual tri-linear filtering god dammit, went a long way to make up for the deficit. A game like Twisted Metal was just ridiculous with the way textures twisted all over the place, and since PSX had wonky or non-existing clipping, the way polys tended to simply disappear completely when they hit the screen edge was also quite painful.

I wouldn't really put one above the other in graphics, really. They both had their strengths and weaknesses overall, but on the whole I would probably give the victory to PSX. N64 games were often juddering and blurry, few seemed to reliably hit even 30fps and more than a few had ugly mailslot-like borders in their PAL release. PSX (which I did not own, by the way) gaming was generally more fluid and responsive, giving it an edge IMO despite lack of now considered cruical technical features. After all, gameplay is king, to quote John Romero I believe.

And yeah, PSX software support was obviously far, far superior. N64 didn't even get a Metroid installment for chrissakes...

If Nintendo hadn't gone and fscked up the N64 DD, maybe things would have turned out differently. It'd been interesting to see the alternate universe where that thing saw worldwide release, and watch how it all turned out.

 

[HTupolev]

PSX games are a mess. Going back and playing games on PSX is painful. Early N64 games were all really low res, but the texture quality was far superior to that on PSX.

Not really. N64 had a bit more system RAM to play with, but the PSX's less insane texture-access approach combined with its vastly larger storage media that it was generally competitive in texture quality, and sometimes had a huge advantage.

A lot of later N64 games also supported 480p

Literally not true, since the N64 only supports 240p and 480i output.

PSX's support for output resolutions and high-res rendering modes was basically comparable to N64's, the biggest cause for discrepancy in typical dev usage is mostly just due to the lack of expansion memory on PSX.

 

[Goodtwin]

Not really. N64 had a bit more system RAM to play with, but the PSX's less insane texture-access approach combined with its vastly larger storage media that it was generally competitive in texture quality, and sometimes had a huge advantage.


Literally not true, since the N64 only supports 240p and 480i output.

PSX's support for output resolutions and high-res rendering modes was basically comparable to N64's, the biggest cause for discrepancy in typical dev usage is mostly just due to the lack of expansion memory on PSX.

Whoops, your right on the 480i, that was habbit of 480p being the standard for Wii games.

Perhaps the texture on the disk was just as high quality, if not higher quality on the PSX, but ultimately the way the consoles used those textures, they always looked far cleaner in the actual game. Textures looked better on the N64 than they did on the PSX, that was my point.

 

[swaaye]

N64 has low precision bilinear filtering with artifacts, a texture buffer design issue that badly limits texture size, and also tends to have dithering artifacts, probably because of low color depth. Its best games look very nice though. The problem is it has few good games. The other problem is the framerate is often barely acceptable, particularly in any game you try to run in a higher resolution mode. It really doesn't have adequate fillrate or memory performance. Memory capacity wasn't really the problem and some games do high-res in the standard 4MB (ex World Driver).

I can't stand PS1 visuals anymore though. Or the load times. Some games with prerendered backgrounds are alright I suppose.

 

[Exophase]

At their best N64 games looked better than PS1 games. You can work around the tiny texture RAM but you just can't substitute for a lack of perspective correction or texture filtering.

and since PSX had wonky or non-existing clipping, the way polys tended to simply disappear completely when they hit the screen edge was also quite painful.

It had a bit of a guard band and the GTE computed some flags to help detect polygons that went outside of it (or depth frustum) and needed to be clipped. I don't remember seeing this sort of thing myself, sounds like bad coding.

Saturn had the worst clipping problems of all. You couldn't tessellate textured polygons against the clip boundary if you wanted to, thanks to textures all being rectangular sprites - so good luck if any vertexes do fall outside the guard band And it has very limited ability to avoid processing pixels that go outside the draw area. Here I do remember frequently seeing polygons disappear against the near plane and sometimes worse.

 

[Nesh]

I voted for PSX after taking into consideration the best of both consoles.
In general most PSX games suffered a lot, but those that shined, were a marvel to behold.
Omega Boost, Gran Turismo 2, Wipeout 2097, Metal Gear Solid, Crash Bandicoot 3, Ridge Racer 4, Ace Combat 3, Tekken 3, Sould Blade, CTR, Vagrant Story, Crono Cross, Tomb Raider. Gex, Quake 2, Spyro, Soul Reaver, etc stood very well against the N64.
Some were technical wonders too and did stuff that nobody thought was possible on it.

 

[London Geezer]

My single biggest hardon killer with the PS1 was the lack of perspective correction, which created those horrible, eye-sore inducing warping textures. I just couldn't get over that, even at that age when I didn't even know what perspective correction is.

 

[Nesh]

Yeah that was very painful with many games. With some games it was worse than in others. I couldnt stand Syphon Filter for that reason.

On the N64 I couldnt stand the blur. Sometimes I didnt understand what was going because of it. Especially in FPS when I got myself too close to walls

 

[swaaye]

If only N64 had been designed to run everything at or near 480i. Of course that wasn't feasible at the time since it would probably need 3x the GPU and memory performance.

 

[jlippo]

My single biggest hardon killer with the PS1 was the lack of perspective correction, which created those horrible, eye-sore inducing warping textures. I just couldn't get over that, even at that age when I didn't even know what perspective correction is.

For me that was bad, but something one could live with.

Lack of sub-pixel accuracy was the killer. (also called sub-pixel correction)

With it there is a magic moment when everything just works and becomes believable due to stability of image.

 

[London Geezer]

Yes! The constantly shaking and trembling, Parkinson's afflicted characters! Eyes! Bleed!

 

[Arwin]

They were both horrible! What a nightmare going from beautifully drawn 2D art to this horrible early 3D vector madness. I think we're only just starting to get to the point where the 3D graphics can look as good and creative as the 2D art, and then benefit from the better animation, lighting, shadowing, etc.

But my goodness, there are very few games on PSX that I can bear playing today. I tried Micro Maniacs the other day because I had the PS1 disc and wanted to see if my son could still enjoy it, but man, while it's a nice game still, it is just outright painful to look at. And yes, the shaking and trembling is a major part in the offence.

 

[Rodéric]

SNES games still look fine today, early/old 3D... horrible !

 

[Goodtwin]

There are certain N64 games that are certainly acceptable. I can still play Mario 64, Zelda OoT, and Wave Race. Granted they are better on the Wii than they were on the N64 thanks to being rendered in 480i/P.

 

[swaaye]

Try playing a few missions of N64 Perfect Dark and then switch to the 60fps, 4x FSAA, 1280x720 Xbox 360 source port....