/vr/ - Retro Games

Going back it's interesting noticing how many N64 games use sophisticated framebuffer effects that were basically nonexistent on PC. The pause menu in Perfect Dark, Conker, and DK64 copies the main buffer to a texture, applies a pseduo-DOF effect and then in PD's case places the little eyepiece in front of it to simulate the human eye focusing on it. Similarly, the Camspy is a super complicated auxiliary framebuffer effect that takes multiple buffers and distorts them in layers to create scanlines and a fisheye effect. In Conker, they used a super fiddly framebuffer effect to handle Bullet Time with the camera spinning around Conker and Berri.

You just didn't see this stuff on PC until several years later. Presumably because manipulating the framebuffer on PC was far more expensive since PC lacked the N64's unified memory architecture where you could copy the buffer up to 60 times a second, apply effects, and then copy it back.

You go back and play PC games from the 90s and early 2000s and they never did stuff like this. Even the PS1 had some framebuffer manipulation capabilities that typically went missing from PC versions. (For instance, Metal Gear Solid for PC is missing every single framebuffer blurring effect.)