/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7253653
>>7253667
Thats Color Banding.
Textures in most games were 16bit and compressed for performance and storage reasons (when Unreal came out I still had 2.5 GB hard drive, and the game occupied ~0.5)
It isn't noticable without filtering since no new colors is introduced there, but after '98 most games started to use texture filter.

The trilinear/bilinear filtering tries to introduce a color transition (gradient) between adjascent texels when you get close, but since texture format doesen't allow for that many colors, and the game does not use dithering as dynamic dither would require more processing power, you see these kind of "bands" of colors isntead.

To be honest you're never supposed to be that close to the surface to see that - the second row of the images is the closes you can get without cheats. I used Ghost cheat to get that close to show the way Detail texture continue to be layered-in and try to make textures to look nicer even beyond reasonable expectations. It succeeds very well in my opinion, and definitely looks better than what we have in 2000-2010 games.
Even modern games often present blurry textures when you get up close.