/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.6126961]

Why isn't the N64 touted more for its smooth textures? Do people seriously not consider it an improvement over this?

[Anonymous No.6126968]

>>6126961
It's mostly due to the misunderstanding that N64 textures look undetailed due to the filtering, when the real reason is that they are just really low-res, and filtering is the only thing that makes them look passable. Filtering saved the day on N64.

[Anonymous No.6126970]

>>6126961
I would much rather play Crispy Mario 64 (tm). Seriously though this looks great!

As for your argument I would contend even smooth Mario 64 looks no better than the Spyro or Crash games on PS1.

[Anonymous No.6126976]

>>6126961
Compared Mario 64’s smooth textures to 64 DS’ unfiltered crisp textures. It’s no contest which looks better.

[Anonymous No.6126980]

>>6126976
Or is that just due to the DS version using higher-res textures, or that the textures just look more detailed on a smaller screen?

[Anonymous No.6126994]

>Fake detail VS natural smoothness
The rule of thumb is very simple. Anything that reasonably approximates reality should be filtered. Anything that is heavily stylized and low-res benefits from sharp edges.

[Anonymous No.6127006]

>>6126961
As the developers intended.

[Anonymous No.6127018]

>>6126961
Because for filtered textures to look better than unfiltered, the resolution has to be ridiculously low with non-uniform pixel sizes. The blur was hiding technical weakness

Whereas its competitors just had reasonable resolution and more uniform pixel size.

[Anonymous No.6127029]

>>6127018
>Because for filtered textures to look better than unfiltered, the resolution has to be ridiculously low with non-uniform pixel sizes
Um what?

[Anonymous No.6127037]

>>6127018
But texture filtering seems to accompany high-resolution textures if anything.
As the PC and consoles got it, texture sharpness also increased.

[Anonymous No.6127039]

>>6127029
Which part are you confused about?

[Anonymous No.6127045]

>>6127037
>But texture filtering seems to accompany high-resolution textures if anything.

Yes but I'm not talking about resolutions that were unachievable in the era. "Filtering looks good on HD textures" is a moot point when talking about whether a console from 1996 should've just had better texture resolution like its competitor from 1994.

[Anonymous No.6127046]

>>6127039
So you think modern games should use unfiltered textures because they don't have ridiculously low resolutions with non-uniform pixel sizes?

There's very little things as stupid as people on here trying to come up with hare brained theories on which resolution, etc best suits filtered/unfiltered when then answer is just artstyle.

[Anonymous No.6127062]

>>6127046
>So you think modern games should use unfiltered textures because they don't have ridiculously low resolutions with non-uniform pixel sizes?

no because >>6127045. I'm not going to explain an exception that's off topic. But it looks like I had to because you're autistic.

>There's very little things as stupid as people on here trying to come up with hare brained theories on which resolution, etc best suits filtered/unfiltered when then answer is just artstyle.

What theory? >>6127039 looks like shit and the typical pixelated texture that isn't giant squares looks good. Make trash blurry, don't make pixel art blurry. It's not fucking difficult.

[Anonymous No.6127073]

>>6127062
To be fair though, the way the pixels appear on that tree might just be the result of really shitty and inaccurate emulator UV texture mapping.

But anyway, the interesting thing is that filtering didn't really cost anything on N64. The reason texture resolution was often low on N64 is because the console had constrained memory bandwidth due to z-buffer and such. Texture filtering was just "free" a cudgel for the console to get away with low-res textures

But Conker had pretty high-res textures, and with filtering they looked good too.

[Anonymous No.6127083]

>>6127073
>But Conker had pretty high-res textures, and with filtering they looked good too.

What video plugin would let me compare both?

[Anonymous No.6127114]

>>6127083
Dunno I don't emulate, but I found this pic.

[Anonymous No.6127129]

>>6127114
Yeah those faces have definitely escaping the category of pixel art

[Anonymous No.6127156]

>>6126961
>>6127039

To be fair with those examples, if those games were on a system like the PS1 or Saturn they'd probably be using much higher quality textures so they wouldn't look that bad unfiltered.

Remember the N64 has a stupidly small texture cache which along with using carts really hurt texture quality.

[Anonymous No.6127167]

>>6127156
>Remember the N64 has a stupidly small texture cache
Its texture cache is twice as large as the one in PS1.

[Anonymous No.6127212]

>>6126961
If the N64 didn't have filtering, you'd see a different approach to texturing used. Namely, not stretching textures out over large areas, since that just spreads blockiness.

>>6127167
The N64's "texture cache" (TMEM) isn't actually a cache.
All textures must be put into TMEM before being drawn.
On the PS1, you can texture from video memory, and the cache is just faster.

[Anonymous No.6127224]

>>6127212
>If the N64 didn't have filtering, you'd see a different approach to texturing used. Namely, not stretching textures out over large areas, since that just spreads blockiness.
Well you’d just get shitty texturing since the textures would still be the same resolution. Or tiling instead of stretching, but that can look worse due to repetition.

>The N64's "texture cache" (TMEM) isn't actually a cache.
It is a cache, one for main memory. The fact you can’t texture directly from main memory doesn’t change that. It has the performance characteristics of cache, being way faster than main RAM anyway.

>On the PS1, you can texture from video memory, and the cache is just faster.
It does mean there’s a texturing speed penalty above 2 KB, so textures between 2 KB and 4 KB in size will be accessible much faster on N64.

[Anonymous No.6127236]

>>6127212
Does this mean the N64 has a hard limit on texture resolution?
>>6127167
Even small texture caches see huge benefits.
There is probably less control on fixed-function hardware, but on modern GPU's, sampling kernels see massive perfomance differences once they exceed the capacity.

[Anonymous No.6127263]

>>6127073
This video perfectly demonstrates why the PS1 was better in practice.
One of the few games that makes good use of compression to fit a competitive amount of information on the cartridge exhibits performance issues.
The artifact-free rendering was just too far ahead of its time.

[Anonymous No.6127272]

>>6127236
>Does this mean the N64 has a hard limit on texture resolution?
Yes. It’s 32x32 for 32-bit textures, 64x32 for 16-bit textures, 64x64 for 8-bit textures, and 128x64 for 4-bit textures. That’s per polygon by the way. You can get bigger textures by subdividing.

[Anonymous No.6127310]

>>6127263
>One of the few games that makes good use of compression to fit a competitive amount of information on the cartridge exhibits performance issues.
Graphically speaking, it has nothing to do with it. Realistically, neither PS1 or N64 would need a graphic asset pool of larger than say 32 MB. That additional space on Conker would be filled up with audio resources, like speech. On PS1 games the CD is mostly filled with FMV and CD audio tracks. Only the smallest N64 cartridges, particularly those under 16 MB would have had to lose texture detail due of a lack of space. The only exception would be RE2 simply due to the sheer amount of stuff they packed in there.

Conker has some performance issues because Rare liked to show off. They could have made it run at a solid 30 FPS, but it wouldn’t have looked as good.

Note that a game like Conker running on PS1 would have worse texturing because of the sheer diverse amount of texturing displayed in that game. Rare were masters of the N64’s texture pipeline at that stage. I’ve seen PS1 games with higher res textures than Conker, but nothing with as many unique fairly high-res textures visible in the one frame as in the mansion room in Conker.

There’s also the matter of PS1’s lack of perspective correct rendering, so large areas have to drop distant textures altogether to work on that platform like in Spyro.

>The artifact-free rendering was just too far ahead of its time.
N64’s RAM just wasn’t fast enough for z-buffering without mad optimisations. Z-buffer eats up all the memory bandwidth, starving the rest of the console.

[Anonymous No.6127328]

>>6127224

The point isn't which system has a bigger texture cache, the point is that the N64 can only render textures from it's 4KB texture cache. PS1 and Saturn can texture from VRAM, which means they don't have to have all their textures fit into that small space. So you can have nicer quality textures overall and more of them.

So on PS1 you can make the decision to keep important textures that are going to need to be accessed quickly and frequently in cache, and the rest can come from VRAM. That way you don't have to sacrifice texture quality as much. On N64 you don't have that option available. It all has to fit in 4KB, so as a result texture quality takes a massive hit.

>>6127310
>On PS1 the CD is filled with FMV and CD Audio
Not really. Many PS1 and Saturn games use MIDI or compressed audio streams to save disc space. For example a game Like Grandia uses ADX audio. The Audio and FMVs take up maybe 300MB of the 500MB CD. That's still ~200MB for the rest of Disc 1.

[Anonymous No.6127349]

What good is better cache memory supported by a console if you can't fit that in its game. The worst problem of Nintendo 64 was not the console's hardware but the lower memory cartridge (64MB) that was used instead of higher memory CD (700MB). Playstation was getting more games because of how easy was to develop without saving memory cache. Playstation had inferior hardware but CD was superior and Nintendo 64 could not compete with that. Its only good thing was the better detailed polygons. Playstation had over stretched sprites that turned graphics ugly with visible pixels due their console while Nintendo 64 had the same problem because of their cartridge but its better console had sampling filter to disguise the pixelated effect from lower memory limitations.

[Anonymous No.6127382]

>>6126976
I filter them anyway in retroarch. Feels good man

[Anonymous No.6127398]

>>6127073
>result of really shitty and inaccurate emulator UV texture mapping.
No, the original artist who made and UV unwrapped the tree model probably only used an 800x600 workstation and simply didn't notice how shitty he unwrapped it. Mario 64 is full of errors and sloppy UV jobs that are unnoticeable on og hardware resolution.

[Anonymous No.6127406]

>>6127328
>On N64 you don't have that option available. It all has to fit in 4KB, so as a result texture quality takes a massive hit.
That's just 4 KB per polygon. Nothing's stopping the texture cache from being flushed with new texture data an unlimited number of times except memory bandwidth.

[Anonymous No.6127418]

>>6127406
>Nothing's stopping the texture cache from being flushed with new texture data an unlimited number of times except memory bandwidth.
>The Z-buffer eats up all the memory bandwidth, starving the rest of the console.

So in other words, with the Z-Buffer enabled you don't have the memory bandwidth to do that.

[Anonymous No.6127429]

>>6127418
It's not that the z-buffer literally takes away all of the bandwidth, but it puts the squeeze on an existing memory bandwidth complication. Namely that N64 only has a single memory bus (making it prone to bus contention) and that RDRAM has an extremely high penalty for non-linear access.

For most developers, turning on the z-buffer pretty much makes it impossible to properly deal with the above mention complications, so something's gotta give. First thing ever developer dumbed down to free up bandwidth in that situation was texture resolution.

Starting with Banjo-Kazooie, Rare managed to come up with sophisticated memory handlers for N64, making usage of bandwidth more efficient and enabling better texturing. Conker is pretty much the peak of these optimization techniques, where they managed to get higher-res and more diverse texturing than PS1 through even with the z-buffer enabled.

N64's got one pretty big advantage over PS1 when it comes to texturing that is rarely ever mentioned. It supports multitexturing so you can create unique texture patterns by mixing and matches textures with different UVs. Banjo-Kazooie is a major user of this feature. You can sort of do it on PS1, but it requires layering polygons which is way less efficient and potentially glitchy.

[Anonymous No.6127430]

>>6127310
The only reason why Rare was the only fag making the best games was because they had better tools and better PC for development compared with other companies so they could compress more memory to run the console near its limit

[Anonymous No.6127469]

>>6126961
N64 don't win because of smooth textures. But because of rounded polygons and better animation. Filtering don't add more pixels

[Anonymous No.6127481]

>>6127430
As was mentioned above, compression of textures into ROM on N64 is overrated when the cartridges got bigger. Both PS1 and N64 lacked the fill rate and memory bandwidth to load in lots of truly high resolution textures even if they were accessible. Shitty texture resolution in many cases on N64 wasn't due to a lack of space but congested memory bandwidth.

The only real exception (and it's arguably not a form of texturing) is when the game uses lots of prerendered backgrounds, then you need a fair amount of storage space to store them.

[Anonymous No.6127483]

>>6127429
>You can sort of do it on PS1, but it requires layering polygons which is way less efficient and potentially glitchy.

Gran Turismo does that for the reflections on and it works pretty well. It can even do it at 60fps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rdAxewJ6fw

[Anonymous No.6127487]

>>6127429
>You can sort of do it on PS1, but it requires layering polygons which is way less efficient and potentially glitchy.

Gran Turismo does that for the reflections on the cars and it works pretty well. It can even do it at 60fps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rdAxewJ6fw

[Anonymous No.6127503]

>>6127481
>Both PS1 and N64 lacked the fill rate and memory bandwidth to load in lots of truly high resolution textures even if they were accessible.
So the fact that N64 had real time graphics with no loading screen doesn't mean it had better memory bandwidth

[Anonymous No.6127505]

>>6127483
>Gran Turismo does that for the reflections on and it works pretty well
I don't know. It could just be gouraud shaded highlights blended with the texture, which the PS1 supports on a single polygon. Or the car body could be gouraud shaded and the reflection is just a texture across with its UVs dynamically changed.

>It can even do it at 60fps:
Why wouldn't it be able to? Do you think that the PS1's ability to layer two polygons over each other normally disappears when it renders at 60fps?

[Anonymous No.6127508]

>>6127503
When I say memory bandwidth, I'm talking about to RAM, not ROM.

[Anonymous No.6127516]

>>6127508
This explains why they added that expansion

[Anonymous No.6127517]

>>6127505
The car is definitely textured, and the reflection is obviously another texture over top of it. Notice that the reflection goes across parts of the car that can't really be done with gouraud shading (Tail lights, logos, the windshield texture, etc.)

>Do you think that the PS1's ability to layer two polygons over each other normally disappears when it renders at 60fps?

No, but you said doing it that way was horribly inefficient. I was simply pointing out that it can't be that bad since the PS1 is doing it and still hitting 60fps.

[Anonymous No.6127546]

>>6127516
Incidentally the Expansion Pak doesn't increase memory bandwidth at all. If it did, that would have been awesome and fixed pretty much all of the N64's non-cartridge problems.

>>6127517
>Notice that the reflection goes across parts of the car that can't really be done with gouraud shading (Tail lights, logos, the windshield texture, etc.)
Having looked carefully at the video, it seems to me that the highlights don't intersect over anything that isn't the body or the windshield (and the windshield could certainly be a gouraud shaded texture, though the tail lights and logos couldn't). I'm not ruling out the layering of textures, but neither the gouraud shading blend theory.

>No, but you said doing it that way was horribly inefficient
I said it was much more efficient, not horribly inefficient. It's certainly more expensive to layer polygons (much more so than to merely subdivide them) than being able to blend textures within the one polygon.

> I was simply pointing out that it can't be that bad since the PS1 is doing it and still hitting 60fps.
At most, it would only equal another car worth of polygons. Considering that Hi-Fi mode is bereft of opponents cars, it should easily manage double the framerate even with that effect (assuming layering).

[Anonymous No.6127549]

>>6127546
*less efficient rather

[Anonymous No.6127561]

>>6127349
This is interesting because the top is an arcade port, while the bottom is a game made specifically for the Playstation. The bottom looks better on the Platstation because they took account of how the pixelated textures were and modeled the art style around it, with a lot of 90 degree angles in the textures. The N64 port just ends up looking blurry because the textures weren't made with filtering in mind.

[Anonymous No.6127638]

Would SM64 be possible at 60 FPS with only minor concessions?

[Anonymous No.6127698]

>>6127481
>>6127546
Why would cartridges get bigger if N64 could not support that. Maybe the developers intended for us to run the game on a better console and hopped they would fix this issue with that expansion. It's a shame because not even emulators can run the game as intended

[Anonymous No.6127708]

>>6127561
Holy shit Sonyggers cope so hard, are you trolling? The N64 looks a generation ahead of the PS1.

[Anonymous No.6127714]

>>6127708
If it wasn't for all the unnecessary blurry

[Anonymous No.6127727]

>>6127487
>It can even do it at 60fps
Only in one mode with limitations though.

[Anonymous No.6127761]

>>6127714
Even with the blur it looks way better than the PS1 mess. The PS1 almost makes you squint to look at it.

[Anonymous No.6127798]

>>6127006
Fuck developer intent

[Anonymous No.6127893]

>>6127546
>>6127727
And in the other modes it's 30fps while still doing that effect for all the cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN45mzQq9Yw

[Anonymous No.6127918]

>>6127708
I also think most 3D Saturn games look miles better than N64’s blurry shite.

[Anonymous No.6127926]

>>6127349
>N64 image is rendered at like 3x higher res than the playstation image for mortal kombat
You expect us to fall for this SHIT

Or is that actually what they both looked like?

[Anonymous No.6127941]

>>6126961
>Why isn't the N64 touted more for its smooth textures?
because that has nothing to do with games being good. having a garbage controller, shoehorned four player modes that run at 10 fps with no background music, shitty carts with no space as an anti consumer move, and ensuring 90% of third party games were total shit because of deliberately worse dev kits have lots to do with the quality of a game

[Anonymous No.6127949]

>this n64 game looks so good
>nevermind that it took 4 years to develop and/or came out after the ps2 when nobody cared about graphics for that gen

[Anonymous No.6127952]

>>6127918
Saturn's polygons are ugly as hell, PS had the prettiest thanks in part to gouraud shading.

[Anonymous No.6127979]

>>6127952
The Saturn actually handles gouraud shading better than the PS1 thanks to it's use of additive blending.

Fighter's Megamix uses it for lighting as well has for the skin tones of some of the characters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsp3wJlTgm4&t=33m45s

[Anonymous No.6128004]

Triangles became the standard, square polygons also had their advantages but I will always prefer PS as having the best 3D characters from that gen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyNRIWVHM3Q

[Anonymous No.6128739]

>>6127979
>Additive blending
That sounds wonky as fuck. Additive blending, at least in general, usually leads to desaturation.
Multiplication is generally how lighting is correctly modulated.

[Anonymous No.6128763]

>>6127263
Well consider the fact it's doing all that without the Expansion Pak. Pretty impressive.

[Anonymous No.6128776]

The N64 feels more like a "real" 3D console. I'd rather have the N64's lower-res textures than the PS1's affline mapping, vertex jitter and low color depth.

[Anonymous No.6129806]

>>6126961
While not related to the console debate itself, I believe texture filtering has received a bad reputation for the mishandling of textures on PC hardware. A lot of textures are downscaled to accommodate the limitations of 3D accelerators, but this has nothing to do with bilinear filtering.

[Anonymous No.6132115]

>>6128739
That's true, which you can see that happen when it's used for normal lighting. For colored lighting and gouraud shading though that problem doesn't present itself as much. It's much faster performance wise than multiplicative blending. That's why devs who worked on both systems at the time all said the Saturn does gouraud shading better than the PS1.

You can see some examples in these SGL demos:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSlBTTVNBfk

[Anonymous No.6132434]

>>6127349
To be fair, only 3 N64 games even USED the 64MB cart. And the DD wouldn't have saved it, just raised the size standard to 64MB. If Resident Evil 2 was anything to go by, it's not the worst number to work with, but ultimately Nintendo just fucked themselves in a number of ways.

[Anonymous No.6133931]

>>6127263
ps1 games don't have perspective correction. They look horrible because of that.

[Anonymous No.6134305]

>>6132115
The big problem with lighting on Saturn is that calculating the vertex colors is done entirely in software.
On PS1, that can get offloaded to the GTE.

as a result, a bunch of Saturn games aren't lit at all and just draw fullbrights
or are only flatshaded
you can get some really damn nice looking shit on Saturn though, like NiGHTS, Burning Rangers, and Sonic R, which have really slick lighting

[Anonymous No.6134694]

>>6134305
The Saturn does have hardware support for some of those effects, the problem is there's so many limitations between resolution modes and VDP1 and VDP2 that it makes it really hard to use it. For example gouraud shading completely breaks in High Res mode. That's why Fighters Megamix runs in a mixed resolution mode so it can still do it.

[Anonymous No.6135090]

>>6128004
After spending 200 hours playing Tekken 7, I still can't believe how fucking cool Tekken 3 sounds and feels.

[Anonymous No.6135095]

CRTs

[Anonymous No.6135107]

>>6134305
>Fullbrights
Ahh the classic Sega blue skies