The N64 should have focused on higher resolution unfiltered assets. The aggressive filtering, softening and blurs in the image ultimately held it back and support for these functions in the hardware ate away space which could have been better spent on more cache for more and higher resolution textures. Graphics would compare far better to what other consoles were doing and it would have been easy to declare the N64 versions superior visually, as the visuals would likely align more with 3DO M2 and Hyper NeoGeo64 graphics.
This early 3D look of unfiltered textures and sprites on 3D has also defined the generation, far more so than the soft extremely polygonal and blurry look of N64 games which is often considered a far more primitive version of what later consoles were doing.
When the hindsight is 20/20!
It's really a retrospect thing because everyone uses LCD panels today. Back when CRTs were the norm and most people were using composite it made sense to do it the way they did. It wasn't the filtering that bogged down the system anyway. It was the z-buffer. But you wouldn't want to disable that because it's what keeps the polys from bouncing around all over the place like they do on PS1. Hell, even the Saturn has more stable 3D than PS1.
Seems like an deflection to irrelevant trivia, really every hardware level function the rcp had took up die space. Reverting those to extra texture cache space would help address the biggest flaw in the hardware. It would also give consumers an opportunity to see nintendos version of that iconc 5th gen aesthetic.
Honestly? Even on an LCD, I think the left looks better. Between blur and crunchy jaggies and pixels, I'll take the former.
I think its a generational thing. We've had over a decade of sharp looking games and upscaling, so people have grown to dislike the blurry 3D of the past. There are viral social media accounts dedicated to enjoying the unfiltered, chunky 3D look.
In 1996, N64 looked better to everyone's eyes. N64 was considered to have way better graphics than Playstation because there weren't wobbly pixelated textures squirming across the screen.
When GL Quake came out, people thought that looked better too.
People don't like it now, but it is absolutely what people wanted at the time.
>This early 3D look of unfiltered textures and sprites on 3D has also defined the generation, far more so than the soft extremely polygonal and blurry look of N64 games which is often considered a far more primitive version of what later consoles were doing.
Imagine telling the people at Silicon Graphics to remove the 3-point bilinear filtering from the hardware, because it lacked soul.
?t=45
>When GL Quake came out, people thought that looked better too.
QuakeGL was released in 1997. There were already quite a few 3D accelerator cards on the market at that point. QuakeGL did offer higher screen resolutions, better framerates and filtered graphics via OpenGL. It was far from the first PC game to use hardware 3D acceleration. But it was the game that popularised OpenGL on the Windows platform. QuakeGL and Quake II were the two games that made developers like Nvidia, ATi, 3DFX, PowerVR, all add OpenGL support to their drivers.
Just using GL Quake as an example of a game that people think looks like shit today, but was absolutely seen as an upgrade at the time.
>Just using GL Quake as an example of a game that people think looks like shit today, but was absolutely seen as an upgrade at the time.
Ah, I was just trying to point out that Quake was not the first PC game to have hardware acceleration. When the game came out in 1996, it did have hardware support maybe one or two cards, but the majority of gamer's played it via software rendering. Though Quake does use the higher end Pentium PC's CPU's for software vertex correction, so no shaky textures in software. But QuakeGL didn't come out until 1997. Quake II was the first game with OpenGL that was sold at retail. QuakeGL was released months before QII. ID Software did not invent OpenGL. They just helped bring it over to the Windows 9X platforms. As OpenGL was on Windows NT. Companies like 3DFX, Nvidia, ATi were all patching OpenGL into their drivers via wrappers.
QuakeGL and Quake II were the games that made bench marking a thing. Tomb Raider 1 supported lots of different graphics API's. But every graphics card company had their own implementation of OpenGL just to add Quake and Quake II support. OpenGL drivers were apparently all over the place with no set standards, though. My first GPU was a ATi RagePro 64 with 8MB of vRAM, I remeber playing Aliens vs Predator Gold on that card, and the game ran like shit. Sadly. Though I later upgraded to a Geforce 256 with 32MB RAM.
cool video
>Back then N64 looked better in everyone's eyes
This is true at all. As a kid I was a N64 fanboy and I recall my neighbours mother claiming Crash Bandicoot was more detailed than Mario 64 which left me with nothing to say but muh open world.
Nintendo was never going to spend the money on RAM to make that possible. Nintendo never has, and never will care about the performance quality or ability of the product they sell, as long as they don't have to sell it at a loss.
Nintendo is in the business of selling video games and video game consoles. That is all they do. Everything must be profitable.
Sony, but particularly Microsoft. lose money from their video game business and subsidize the costs using profits from successful departments. They do not have a sound business model and do it, I would assume, as some sort of brand advertising.
>Sony, but particularly Microsoft. lose money from their video game business and subsidize the costs using profits from successful departments
This is completely wrong, moron. Games & Network Services has the highest operating income of any Sony division.
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/archive.html
And Microsoft makes it in services and licensing. Last I heard they were profitable, but I that was about 4 years ago when I left the company.
Hardware companies tend to make their money on software licensing. Every game sold on a system pays the company some amount.
obviously the N64 should have been made with my autistic dream specs
t. born after the console came out
this. back then we were ashamed of fat pixels because they look unnatural. we embraced every new display technology because we were living in the "now" and were obsessed with new tech.
i remember loving the shit of texture filtering when it came out.
I like how in the example, on the "blurry" left image you can read the fine print text on the car, but on the "sharp" right image it is illegible.
It's an emulated comparison, take it with a grain of salt.
Both PS1 and N64 emulators can render accurate pixel-perfect graphics indistinguishable from the real hardware now. I'm not sure if they actually are in the OP shot (never played that game), but the PS1 and N64 shots here definitely are (no clue about the bottom two, though).
This is one of those games that really did struggle on N64. The soundtrack is half the reason you play.
I found THPS1 fared relatively well on that front, or at least as well as could've been expected. I think only a couple of the more forgettable songs got excised, and they spared the catchiest song from being totally lobotomized. Not sure about the sequel, though, as I got that for PS1.
That's the thing about that era of consoles. Hardware varied too wildly between systems so multiplats came down to what system the game was meant to be played on, even if theoretically the game should run perfectly fine on all of them.
You can take away my VaselineVision(tm) from my cold, dead hands.
The "aggressive filtering, softening and blurs" are all one single function that was a no-cost GPU step. Things pass through the step whether the answer is yes or no to filter it. Not a single game would perform any better without it, not one. You don't understand what was holding it back.
N64 has texture dimensions caps, small cart space and shared memory in too small an amount, which is the main cause of excessively blurry textures. They were very low res images being stretched too far and the 3-point bilinear filter could never make that look okay.
>4kb TMEM
>"Nintendo should have disabled texture smoothing!"
It would have been a disaster.
N64 had very low color bandwidth, I mean just look at how flat and dark that shading on the left is, main issue is really that. If it could do addictive blending like the PS1 could it wouldn't matter if the image was filtered.
Only game I saw going past those issues was Mario Tennis.
https://www.youtube.com/c/KazeEmanuar
Good channel if you want to learn about the N64 hardware and code.
I have a real fondness for texture filtering. When DUSK came out, I noticed that it had unfiltered textures and turned them on, thinking something along the lines of "I didn't get a Voodoo 2 just to look at blocky pixels!"
I'll even turn it on in Doom, even though it makes people ass-mad. It's just how the 3D games I got most attached to growing up looked. It even annoys me when these throwback shooters leave out filtering options.
the only reason i still prefer software rendering in Doom is the contrast. i have no love for big squares
you're implying there was any coherent architecture to the n64 whatsoever. there wasn't. it's a nonsensical pile of shit whose theoretical output is throttled by an absurd memory scheme that looks like it was designed by a moronic ai. the whole console was the engineering equivalent of trying to run a concorde on moonshine
4kb texture cache moron