8 ms·

Comparing the N64 and PSX is painful on many levels, I've always found the polygon tearing effect on the PSX extremely distracting and off-putting visually. (Th

Comparing the N64 and PSX is painful on many levels, I've always found the polygon tearing effect on the PSX extremely distracting and off-putting visually. (This artifact is an apparent result a lack of floating point support[0]) However the massive size of disc based PSX games vs N64 carts yielded visual variety that we just didn't get on the N64. Not to mention the music, although N64 Tetrisphere's amazing music by Neil Voss was actually implemented as an interpreted mod track composed in FastTracker complete with samples. Such a good game. [0]: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php?page=3 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tric...

rangibaby 10y ago
It's not tearing, it's called affine swim, and on PC is a tell tale sign of a software renderer. Overall the N64 was ok (I had one). The PS2 was so much better though, there was just a way better variety of good games. N64 kind of sucked if you didn't want to play Goldeneye, Zelda or Super Mario 64 clones. Also, Tetrisphere! There is a game I had forgotten about. It was so good!
- exDM69 10y ago
  > It's not tearing, it's called affine swim, and on PC is a tell tale sign of a software renderer. I've never hear the term "affine swim" before. Is it an artifact in rasterization (leaving gaps between triangles) or texturing (the term "affine" suggests that)? For the rasterization, I've heard the term "watertight rasterization" (or airtight?) being used for a gapless rasterizer. It's not necessarily a software vs. hardware render issue, you can implement a watertight software rasterizer (of course) but I guess in the 1990s this was a performance vs. fidelity issue. And even with early 3d accelerators, the vertex processing was still done in the CPU.
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    Unfortunately I am not an expert but the Wikipedia article has an explanation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping#Affine_texture_mapping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping#Affine_textu... Affine swim refers to the unique results this kind of texturing results in (it looks like textures are swimming)
justinhj 10y ago
Yeah there was no floating point for a while on consoles. I remember spending a week or two making a renderer that subdivided geometry so the textures would tear less. It was more expensive so had to be done based on view distance.

rangibaby 10y ago

It's not tearing, it's called affine swim, and on PC is a tell tale sign of a software renderer. Overall the N64 was ok (I had one). The PS2 was so much better though, there was just a way better variety of good games. N64 kind of sucked if you didn't want to play Goldeneye, Zelda or Super Mario 64 clones. Also, Tetrisphere! There is a game I had forgotten about. It was so good!

exDM69 10y ago
> It's not tearing, it's called affine swim, and on PC is a tell tale sign of a software renderer. I've never hear the term "affine swim" before. Is it an artifact in rasterization (leaving gaps between triangles) or texturing (the term "affine" suggests that)? For the rasterization, I've heard the term "watertight rasterization" (or airtight?) being used for a gapless rasterizer. It's not necessarily a software vs. hardware render issue, you can implement a watertight software rasterizer (of course) but I guess in the 1990s this was a performance vs. fidelity issue. And even with early 3d accelerators, the vertex processing was still done in the CPU.
- rangibaby 10y ago
  Unfortunately I am not an expert but the Wikipedia article has an explanation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping#Affine_texture_mapping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping#Affine_textu... Affine swim refers to the unique results this kind of texturing results in (it looks like textures are swimming)

justinhj 10y ago

Yeah there was no floating point for a while on consoles. I remember spending a week or two making a renderer that subdivided geometry so the textures would tear less. It was more expensive so had to be done based on view distance.