/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4568786
Wrong. PS1 can stream textures from its 2KB texture cache or directly from its 1mb of VRAM, whereas the N64 is limited by its 4kb cache no matter what. That's not say that the N64 didn't have some games with impressive texture work due to workarounds (Banjo-Tooie and Perfect Dark come to mind), but generally the PS1 was better at texturing.
>>4568838
It would have made some games a lot smoother. Not being able to manually rotate the camera in a game like OoT or using twin sticks in Goldeneye is a drag. The games usually played great regardless, but it would have been nice to have and while I imagine Nintendo was trying to account for people not liking analog controls by giving them the option to use one side of the controller or the other, the trident design was just stupid in retrospect.

>>4499172
>N64 had a castrated texture memory
People really need to learn how this shit worked.

>>3280245
The z-buffer is only part of the equation. The lack of it doesn't cause wobbling. Basically the PS1 lacks three things that the N64 has which is responsible for its janky looking graphics.

Z-buffer: Prevents polygons from being drawn in the wrong order along the z-axis (e.g. a character that is supposed to be behind a wall is drawn in front of it)

Sub-pixel correction: Prevents polygon animation from jittering

Perspective correct texture mapping: Prevents textures from distorting when viewed from non-parallel angles

>>3280339
> but the n64 had very blurry or even non existent looking textures (basically just colors)

I think the "non-existent" textures thing or colors (the technical term is 'gouraud shading' as you say, is really just a stereotypical view of early N64 games like Mario 64 that isn't actually true. Mario 64 isn't actually very heavy on gouraud shading. Most of the surfaces in the game are basically monochrome textures blended with vertex colors. That may look quite simple, but it's more than just gouraud shading.

I would say that Playstation games go much harder on gouraud shading than N64 games. But you are also right when you say that Playstation games tend to have higher resolution textures. So how does one explain this discrepancy?

It's due to the texturing architecture of both systems. The Playstation can pull larger textures "in one hit" straight from its VRAM but fewer of them due to a larger overhead of texturing from VRAM. The N64 can only texture from its texture cache, which is 4 KB in size, which means that is the maximum size per individual texture - but the texture cache is a fast access piece of memory, you can pull lots of separate textures from it. The Playstation has a texture cache too but it's smaller.

So on average you get N64 games that have medium-sized textures covering everything, while PS1 games usually show a few high resolution textures but gouraud shading makes up the rest.