We didn't split polygons, and you are correct that this doesn't provide an absolutely perfect solution either. However, it does in practice eliminate the flicke

We didn't split polygons, and you are correct that this doesn't provide an absolutely perfect solution either. However, it does in practice eliminate the flickery polygons, because the polygon ordering is far more stable than it is with bucketing. And you can actually see a difference between Crash 1 and Crash 2+ if you pay close enough attention. For Crash 2, Stephen White cloned the PS1's renderer in software for the SGI so that it was pixel-for-pixel accurate. He did this in like two days, thereby earning himself a place in my top-5-programmers-I've-ever-worked-with list. If you look closely during Crash 1 while you're moving Crash, you can see sometimes see what Andy not-so-affectionately called "crispies". These are pixel-size flickery bits caused by the subtle difference between the SGI's renderer and the PS1's hardware renderer. Just the difference in the way the two implementations rounded fractional coordinates showed up in the game.