8 ms·

The N64 really is blur central, because of this post-processing you point out but also because of the severe texture limitations (and primitive kinda-bilinear-b

by simias 6y ago

The N64 really is blur central, because of this post-processing you point out but also because of the severe texture limitations (and primitive kinda-bilinear-but-not-really filtering they used) meant that you had small resolution textures stretched onto massive polygons. The fact that cartridge ROM space was also expensive didn't help since few cartridges went above 32MB (I think the biggest official N64 ROMs use 64MB cartridges, but those were pretty rare). Meanwhile a CD could hold one order of magnitude more data at no additional cost. As a result I subjectively find that despite having significantly weaker hardware, no perspective correction and no subpixel-precision PSX games often end up looking a lot more impressive. And that's got a lot to do with the incredible texture work these games use: https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/243918-vagrant-story-playstation-screenshot-intro-with-in-game-graphics.jpg https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/243918-vagrant-stor...

mikepurvis 6y ago
> no additional cost The additional cost was an enormous step up in seek time and read time, which for some games manifested as load times everywhere, and for others meant a herculean effort in managing asset streaming, per the fascinating Andy Gavin talk that Ars published a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
- simias 6y ago
  That's fair, but as long as you packed your assets correctly it was bearable for the time IMO. So much available storage meant that you could duplicate textures instead of seeking all over the disc for instance. Also streaming assets was rather uncommon at the time, Naughty Dog is really pushing the envelope here. It was especially uncommon because most games streamed the background music in real time straight from the CD, so if you wanted to side-load assets on demand you had to be very clever about it lest the audio got interrupted. As a result you generally had long loading times at the start of levels but that's about it. Some games were really bad about it though, and had long loading times all over the place (some even when you do something as trivial as opening a menu) but that could generally be attributed to shoddy programming, not a weakness of the console per-se. Overall I think in hindsight the decision to use a disc drive was the right one and cartridges ended up being a rather severe liability for Nintendo at that time, although of course it's far from the only factor at play when comparing the successes of both consoles.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I never owned a PSX, but my impression is that a lot of games did that thing where the actual game content was a few dozen MB at most, and the rest of the disc was either empty or used for background music, FMVs, etc.
midnightclubbed 6y ago
The RDP's texture memory (that the RSP had to dma a texture in to before it could be drawn) was 4kb. Yup, with a k. There were a few texture formats you could use. 16bit RGB was the lazy choice but you could squeeze more resolution if you used 4 or 8 bit greyscale (single channel) and put colors in the vertices. You could also use palletized textures, with either 8 or 4 bit lookups (eg 256 or 16 unique colors per texture). Unfortunately that split the texture memory in half - the palette was 2kb and lookup was 2kb. If you were doing things right you spent a lot of time tweaking palettes by hand and writing code to best chose palette colors. Tldr; 48x48 16bit RGBA, 48x48 palletized 256 color RGBA, 64x64 palletized 16 color RGBA, 96x96 4 bit intensity.
- monocasa 6y ago
  And if you enabled mipmapping, that practically cut it down to 2KB. 32x32x16bpp.
magicalist 6y ago
> As a result I subjectively find that despite having significantly weaker hardware, no perspective correction and no subpixel-precision PSX games often end up looking a lot more impressive. And that's got a lot to do with the incredible texture work these games use: https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/243918-vagrant-story-playstation-screenshot-intro-with-in-game-graphics.jpg https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/243918-vagrant-stor... OTOH, Vagrant Story came very late in the PS1's life (the PS2 came out like a month later), that's from an in-engine cinematic scene, the texture swimming issues aren't really noticeable in a screenshot, and it's hard to say for sure, but that may be a screenshot from an emulator. The real experience was a bit more like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GVE4a8ULww&t=912 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GVE4a8ULww&t=912 (screenshot is from around 15:13). Still pushing the hardware to the max, but games in a similar part of the n64's lifecycle (especially the ones requiring the expansion pak, Majora's Mask, Banjo-Tooie, Perfect Dark) also look pretty remarkable for the time.
- p1necone 6y ago
  I'm pretty certain that first screenshot is from an emulator - it's too high res (and too clean) to be a capture from real hardware.

by simias 6y ago

mikepurvis 6y ago

> no additional cost The additional cost was an enormous step up in seek time and read time, which for some games manifested as load times everywhere, and for others meant a herculean effort in managing asset streaming, per the fascinating Andy Gavin talk that Ars published a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o

simias 6y ago
That's fair, but as long as you packed your assets correctly it was bearable for the time IMO. So much available storage meant that you could duplicate textures instead of seeking all over the disc for instance. Also streaming assets was rather uncommon at the time, Naughty Dog is really pushing the envelope here. It was especially uncommon because most games streamed the background music in real time straight from the CD, so if you wanted to side-load assets on demand you had to be very clever about it lest the audio got interrupted. As a result you generally had long loading times at the start of levels but that's about it. Some games were really bad about it though, and had long loading times all over the place (some even when you do something as trivial as opening a menu) but that could generally be attributed to shoddy programming, not a weakness of the console per-se. Overall I think in hindsight the decision to use a disc drive was the right one and cartridges ended up being a rather severe liability for Nintendo at that time, although of course it's far from the only factor at play when comparing the successes of both consoles.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I never owned a PSX, but my impression is that a lot of games did that thing where the actual game content was a few dozen MB at most, and the rest of the disc was either empty or used for background music, FMVs, etc.

midnightclubbed 6y ago

The RDP's texture memory (that the RSP had to dma a texture in to before it could be drawn) was 4kb. Yup, with a k. There were a few texture formats you could use. 16bit RGB was the lazy choice but you could squeeze more resolution if you used 4 or 8 bit greyscale (single channel) and put colors in the vertices. You could also use palletized textures, with either 8 or 4 bit lookups (eg 256 or 16 unique colors per texture). Unfortunately that split the texture memory in half - the palette was 2kb and lookup was 2kb. If you were doing things right you spent a lot of time tweaking palettes by hand and writing code to best chose palette colors. Tldr; 48x48 16bit RGBA, 48x48 palletized 256 color RGBA, 64x64 palletized 16 color RGBA, 96x96 4 bit intensity.

monocasa 6y ago
And if you enabled mipmapping, that practically cut it down to 2KB. 32x32x16bpp.

magicalist 6y ago

> As a result I subjectively find that despite having significantly weaker hardware, no perspective correction and no subpixel-precision PSX games often end up looking a lot more impressive. And that's got a lot to do with the incredible texture work these games use: https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/243918-vagrant-story-playstation-screenshot-intro-with-in-game-graphics.jpg https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/243918-vagrant-stor... OTOH, Vagrant Story came very late in the PS1's life (the PS2 came out like a month later), that's from an in-engine cinematic scene, the texture swimming issues aren't really noticeable in a screenshot, and it's hard to say for sure, but that may be a screenshot from an emulator. The real experience was a bit more like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GVE4a8ULww&t=912 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GVE4a8ULww&t=912 (screenshot is from around 15:13). Still pushing the hardware to the max, but games in a similar part of the n64's lifecycle (especially the ones requiring the expansion pak, Majora's Mask, Banjo-Tooie, Perfect Dark) also look pretty remarkable for the time.

p1necone 6y ago
I'm pretty certain that first screenshot is from an emulator - it's too high res (and too clean) to be a capture from real hardware.