Is It Me, or Does the Nintendo 64 SUCK?!

[Kamahl]

Banjo Tooie, and The Legend of Zelda - Majora's Mask for the very least.

Two of my favourite N64 games incidentally. Guess I'm a graphics whore .

[gamevet]

Except that i didn't

[DSwizzy145]

Lol

[DSwizzy145]

Two of my favourite N64 games incidentally. Guess I'm a graphics whore .

I was quite surprised at those two games at the time for having the best looking graphics of the 2000's well i mean it was one of those very late N64 games along with DK64 (despite that game having WAYYY to much low res graphic detail for a 1999 title with mid resolution) and the gameplay of those two were very enjoyable to me and my older brother, though he was a Banjo-Kazooie guy and love the series (though he hasn't finished Nuts & Bolts) and also Majora's Mask was another favorite of mines cuz of the bosses and the mask especially Firece Deity Link ;-)

[A Black Falcon]

Quake and Tomb Raider both looked fine on PCs at the time. Would they benefit from filtering? Yes. But they still looked good, and they didn't have a whole lot of pixelation or jaggies. The point is though, PC had good looking games around that time. The N64 had nothing to do with it.

Tomb Raider looks good with hardware 3d acceleration, but without it, no way. It looks more like the PS1/Saturn versions that way, which is rough looking. I played a lot of computer games back then. Software 3d looked UGLY, and the framerates were often not great either. As for Quake, the game looked great for the time, but certainly looked a lot better once better 3d cards came available... most notably the 3DFX Voodoo1, which released at the end of '96. But even after that, you had to actually have the card to get the benefits of it. Without one, you were suffering like I was all the way until the end of 1998, trying to play some 3d games on that abysmal S3 ViRGE thing and its worse framerates in "accelerated" mode than software, poor graphics in software mode, etc.

Yes, by PC and Arcade standards they are low resolution. But I didn't say they were "High resolution" textures. I said they were higher resolution than the N64. Which is true.

Just saying, the texture resolutions aren't as big of an advantage as you make it sound considering the resolution of PS1 or Saturn textures. Those textures, versus filtered ones? It's a matter of taste really.

As for "PS1 and Saturn have blocky pixelated textures!" argument, please point to the pixelated blocky textures in this Saturn shot:

Cherrypicked images don't really prove your point you know, they are not exactly representative of the system. But anyway, of course there are blocky textures in that picture -- see the hand of the person on the right, for example. You aren't great at seeing pixelated textures, are you.

Or it was the benefit of releasing 2 years later with lower production costs on that technology? The point is, it's not revolutionary when you're not the first one in the industry to do it. And before you say "first console!", the 360 was the first system to have a multicore CPU, did that make it revolutionary even though PCs were already doing it? No.

Sorry, but it IS revolutionary to do something that has not previously been done in the field you're working in.

When the Saturn and PS1 versions of a game have better looking textures, the systems are not equal in terms of texturing. I'm sorry, but being forced to use shit quality textures on the N64 negates the benefits of filtering. Filtering instead becomes a crutch to try and hide the fact the textures are so poor.

There is absolutely no proof behind anything you say here. Nintendo and SGI themselves said that they put the filtering in to get rid of visible pixels, because they thought 3d graphics looked better without them. I believe that that was indeed the reason for it. Your reasoning here is entirely backwards, twisted against Nintendo. As for the low texture quality, the original idea was to do something like Mario 64, with mostly shaded environments with only scattered textures. It was an annoying oversight for sure, but every time you mention it you massive4ly overstate how big of a problem it is, while rarely mentioning the major downsides of the other systems' 3d.

A texture is a 2D image applied to a polygon. So my example still stands.

Are you seriously saying that you think that the exact same graphical styles look equally good in both 2d and 3d? You'd be pretty much the only one, then.

If you were looking at 2 cubes in a 3D world, one using the filtered low resolution texture, the other using the unfiltered higher resolution texture, which would look better?

Most 3d games aren't just made of giant cubes, so this is an irrelevant comparison. And regardless, it depends on the game, the art quality, etc.

You're again confusing pixelation/blockyiness with unfiltered. Pixelation/blockiness has much more to do with poor quality low resolution textures. Games on the Saturn that were rushed show this where they are using placeholder textures that never had finalized textures put in. House of the Dead is a good example of this.

I'm not confusing anything, you just seem to be unable to see blocky, pixelated textures when you're staring at them. That makes it hard to discuss this issue... For one thing, when you have low-rez graphics like most 3d Saturn games use (for the actual in-game resolution), you're going to have blockyness; this has to be on of the reasons why games on both PS1 and Saturn often look blockier on Saturn, the lower resolutions. Of course the absence of any filtering is another issue that both platforms share; it makes their textures look pixelated compared to N64 textures.

The unfiltered ryu shot does not look blocky or chunky by any means. it looks clean and detailed. I agree, filtering looks good when the texture quality is up to par. But filtering poor quality textures doesn't look good, it looks blurry and poor. Again here's the original post I made explaining this for you:

That supposed "N64 texture quality" version, the N64 can do textures a lot better than that. And anyway, you don't get a decent lower-rez (or higher-rez) texture by just downscaling (or upscaling) the texture, you have to redraw it to fit the new resolution.

Irrelevant to the point you tried to make. You tried to say the reason there weren't a lot of 2D games on the N64 was because it came out when the "3D is taking over" craze was in full effect, while the Saturn and PS1 were around for 2 years prior. The fact that the Saturn and PS1 were still getting tons of 2D games after the N64 came out completely torpedoes that argument out of the water.

I accounted for everything you say here in my initial statement, so there's really nothing else to say here other than that you're ignoring at least half of what I said. So to repeat myself, there are two main reasons why the N64 has so few 3d games. The first one is because it was the beginning of the time where 2d games were considered lesser games not worthy of getting much attention, and the second is because the N64's higher game publishing costs made publishers unwilling to release many games that weren't aimed at the widest audience -- that is, 3d games, because of reason #1. The PS1 had much lower publishing costs, to making little games that the largest audience wouldn't care about was more feasible.

Sorry but the N64 has tons of jaggies. Maybe you should go play a real one again. Here's a comparison Barone posted in another thread, Somehow the N64 actually has worse jaggies than the PS1 in this shot:

Sure, because of the low resolutions involved the N64 has some jaggies, but I'm sure it's less than the PS1 on the whole... and anyway, regardless of having a few more jaggies, the N64 shot in that comparison clearly looks better than the PS1 one does.

As for processing power, yes the N64 has a 64 bit processor clocked at a higher speed, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Saturn and PS1 could possibly keep up with it.

If the other systems could do that, PS1 and Saturn games would have games with software mip-mapping, software perspective correction, software Z-buffering, etc etc, I would think. They don't. There is a reason for that -- the PS1 and Saturn aren't nearly powerful enough, either in their CPUs or their graphics chip(s), to keep up with the N64.

And didn't the N64 have some severe bus limitations that further bottlenecked the CPU? I'd say the more important CPU aspect the N64 has over the PS1 and Saturn is that it as an actual FPU.

As for warping and broken seams, that's more of a PS1 issue. You don't really see that happening a lot on the Saturn.

We've covered this before, but while it's certainly a lot worse on the PS1, the Saturn (and 3DO) do also have perspective issues, particularly in the middle of textures. Recall that video where those ex-3DO developers talk about perspective issues on the 3DO; the Saturn is the same.

And for memory, again the N64 has more, but if I remember correctly it's slower and has bus bottlenecks.

No, no, the N64 has RDRAM, RAMBUS's type of RAM. It was a somewhat popular kind of RAM in the mid '90s to early '00s, and has some significant advantages over regular SDRAM like the other systems have. It does have longer access times, but it makes up for it with very fast read times -- so it takes longer to put stuff into RAM, but while reading something from memory, it'll be a lot faster than with regular RAM of the time. Nintendo, Sony, and Intel all saw the advantages of RDRAM over SDRAM and used it as the main system RAM in a system they made during that time -- Nintendo in the N64, Sony in the PS2 (yes, the PS2 uses RDRAM if you had forgotten), and Intel in early Pentium 4 PC motherboards. My old computer, from early 2001, is one of those RDRAM P4 systems. RDRAM costs more than regular RAM (when I added RAM to that P4 in 2002, I probably paid twice what I would have if it had regular RAM!), but the speed boost was worth it.

Oh -- RDRAM is also the reason for the need for that connector block that comes in the N64 if you haven't added an Expansion Pak into the system. While normal RAM allows slots to be empty, in RDRAM systems for some reason you have to fill the empty slots with blanks like that. In PCs RDRAM is also always paired, so each of the two pairs of RAM slots have to have identical RAM strips in them in my old PC.

Throw in the horrible texture cache and that really limits the effectiveness of those advanced CPU features.

It doesn't at all. You're so, so biased against the N64...

[quote]Yeah man, I remember hopping on youtube over dial-up back in the 90's to watch that video. Good times...

Oh did you forget that this was before the age of the internet and the only people who really saw that were the press? The best the rest of us had access to were a few pictures in magazines. Throw in the fact that magazines still didn't get to everyone who bought those systems and it becomes obvious no one was going on about that. Most were probably just going "oh cool, 3D Mario."

I don't know what magazines you were reading, but the magazines I was reading -- mostly Nintendo Power, for console gaming news, along with PC Gamer for PC stuff but they wouldn't have talked about the N64 of course -- certainly mentioned this, more than a few times. Are you REALLY saying that before the internet companies could not hype up their systems and talk about its hardware features? What? You must know how much nonsense that is. You don't need a video to make the point that video does; screenshots of that dolphin demo sufficed, and helped build up the hype for the system's graphical potential to unreasonable levels (for what a $200 system could do).

Nice sidestepping there. Just get straight to the point. If you liked those genres, you were fucked if you only had an N64. Those genre's are few and far between, and what is there isn't necessarily grade A quality.

Eh, it'd be nice to have more games on the N64, but ultimately, it's not important. The games the N64 has are great. Other systems do those genres well. Again, systems don't need to represent every kind of game in order to be a great system. They just have to have games you think are really great.

Again, I said higher res than the N64. That's a big difference. I'm sorry, but a poor quality low resolution texture that's blurred to death will never look better than a higher resolution unfiltered version. You may like looking at blurry shit all the time, but I don't.

I would not call textures like those you see in most PS1 or Saturn games good by any stretch of the imagination. They aren't, at all. N64 filtering doesn't look great either, but it's not worse most of the time.

Please, point to the ugly:

Grandia is a game with nice 2d sprites on top of 3d environments. The art design is great, but the game is seriously held back by the really ugly polygonal 3d! The sprites look fine, and the art design is, again, good, but the 3d, from the models to the textures to everything else, is just so rough looking. I'd say the Lunar remakes look a lot better, since they stick with entirely 2d graphics. Grandia definitely looks better on Saturn than PS1 (I have both versions, and the Digital Museum disc for Saturn as well -- Grandia is a really good game!), but it still looks rough and blocky on Saturn.

As for that shot in particular, I've probably said this before (because that shot has been posted before), but what's going on with those insanely jagged shadows? They look AWFUL! Of course the shot is very low-resolution and blocky, too, the games' biggest issue visually.

Please, point to the broken seams, warping, and jaggies:

Cherrypicked shots can look okay, sure... but also, warping is something that's hard to see from a still image, versus a video. You can't see a texture warp when it's not moving, really, even for PS1 games where it's a horrible problem. As for broken polygon seams, sure, that's a lot worse on PS1 than Saturn. I was referring to both systems there, not just the Saturn. And despite having less warping and not many of those broken polygon seams, few people would say (though I'm sure some people here do!) that Saturn 3d looks better than PS1 3d, because of other advantages the PS1 has -- higher resolutions in many games, transparencies and other effects, probably higher polygon counts, etc etc.

As for those games, Virtua Cop certainly benefits from the railed nature of the game, and that most action takes place on static (not moving) screens. I'm sure the rails allow them to make the graphics look a lot nicer than they would look if you could walk around in those environments. As for the other two, I'm sure you'd notice the expected issues in motion, in Sonic R in particular because it has much more complex environments -- remember that the Saturn VF games have 2d backdrops.

[A Black Falcon]

Quake looks like a PC game not as good but like Doom it looks like a PC game , same goes for the likes of Hexxen , F1 GP and so on Quake II, The world is not enough , Clover . Just becasue a game is blurry doesn't mean its can't look like a PC game

Agreed.

This is pretty similar to my experience. I had a Turbo CD and a Sega CD, and had significant experience with 3DO and PC CD-ROM, when I got a Saturn in December of 1995 and a good friend of mine got a Playstation around the same time. By the N64's release, I'd played 6 different CD-ROM platforms. Although I never stopped playing SNES and Genesis cartridge games for as long as they were still coming out, CD games were something I took for granted by that point. I thought the N64 being cartridge based was bizarre and lame. I also thought the cartridge-based 32x and Jaguar were silly, but at least they were earlier. But I always thought the SNES should have been the final cartridge-based console.

Still, I could have forgiven the use of cartridges. The N64 never really clicked with me and that's not the only reason why. I don't even really mind, in the specific, that the N64 doesn't have much in the way of RPGs, or this or that genre. I have always been a multiple systems type of gamer and don't need an all-purpose system where every type of game is represented.

I was primarily a PC gamer all decade in the '90s, my parents refused to ever buy me a TV console, only handhelds (GB and then GBC) and even that took convincing. At least we had decent computers to play games on from early '92 on. That N64 I got in fall '99 I bought with my own money. That's why I got it so late, I had to save up, and in '98 I chose to get a Voodoo2 card instead of a console; it cost about as much as one!

No, I'm not. The statement was that N64 games "didn't look like" PC games. The N64 having more powerful hardware than the Playstation doesn't go against that statement. There's a few PC ports that do retain the overall look of the PC versions, but among the N64 library they're by far the exception graphically. Otherwise, N64 games simply don't look like PC games, and vice-versa. The 3DO, Saturn, and Playstation were all in line with what was going on on the PC. PCs adopted CD-ROMs far more rapidly than 3D accelerator cards, and even with the latter, for years the emphasis was more on texture mapping and polygon rendering capabilities than something like filtering. PC gaming didn't ditch 2D so fast, and was quick to make use of things like prerendered CG, digitized images, animations, and live-action FMV.

On the N64, almost everything had to be purely polygonal, fully 3D, and minimally textured, with no digitized artwork, FMV, or even bitmap backgrounds. Even Command & Conquer had to be 3D on the N64. That may be because it was a port of an old game, but Red Alert 2 came out over a year later on PC and retained the style of the prior games rather than adopting the N64 style. Even within the realm of fully 3D games, look at a game like Driver, which has much better graphics on PC than Playstation, but the overall aesthetic is still similar between the two, and in no way does the PC version look like an N64 game.

Wait, do you really meed that they "didn't look like" PC games on that basic a level as "the N64 has fewer 2d games"? I thought the point was about graphical quality, and as far as graphical quality goes, N64 graphics look more like mid to late '90s PC graphics than PS1 or Saturn graphics do, because they have the built-in features you'll also find in PC 3D accelerator cards. Of course PCs, by '97 or '98, were more powerful than the N64, but that always happens with consoles, they never stay ahead of the PC. The N64 was more powerful for a few months in '96, before 3DFX, but as always with consoles and their static hardware, the PC caught up after that.

So sure, when I compared my Voodoo2 to my new N64 in '99 I (accurately) thought it had worse graphics than my PC, but I'd have found the PS1 or Saturn even more lacking, because at least N64 3d holds together in a way that just doesn't happen on the other systems.


As for genres and stuff, though, the PS1 is probably closest to the PC in terms of games because it has the most games of any of the consoles that generation. But that's not at all a negative for the N64 -- it makes it stand out. In general, it's much easier to make a case that if you have a good PC you don't really NEED a Playstation or Xbox console (right up to current gen), but Nintendo? If you like Nintendo-style games, you need their hardware.

As for C&C 64, I think that was remade in 3d more as giving people a reason to re-buy a several-years-old game more so than anything else... or maybe because 3d fit the console better than 2d would have? I mean, the tiny 2d sprites on interlaced TVs look of PS1/Saturn C&C does not look that good because of how much of the detail of the PC game is lost from the lower resolution, and from sitting so much farther from the screen. The 3d of C&C 64 is probably a benefit to the game -- it makes stuff a bit easier to see. You wouldn't need that on PC.

N64 games look like PC Games? lol. Show me an N64 game that holds up to Unreal please.

I love the Unreal Tournament series (the first one is my favorite! A real classic, that game), but oddly enough I've never played the single-player series it spun out of. I really should play Unreal sometime, I might like it.

Yeah but it's barely textured. The N64 looks pretty damn good when you aren't using a lot of textures. Unreal is obviously far more technically impressive with tons of textures. So N64 games don't look like PC games, at all.

Of course the N64 can't match Unreal technically, there was no way that $200 hardware from mid 1996 was going to be able to handle graphics just as good as one of 1998's best-looking PC games! But PS1 or Saturn 3d is even farther behind what PC games of the time could do than N64 3d is.

I remember the mags like Next Gen and EGM being floored by Turok 2's graphics in the fall of 98. They thought that it rivaled many PC games at the time. Turok 2 was one of the main reasons I bought another N64 after selling my first one (frustrated with the early software droughts).

Yeah, Turoks 1 and 2 were a big deal on the N64. They were two of the system's best-selling third-party games, too -- some of the only third-party N64 games to sell a million copies. But showing how the power gap between PCs and the N64 quickly widened in '97 and beyond, the PC ports of Turoks 1 and 2 have better graphics than the N64 versions, but didn't sell nearly as well or score as highly as they had on the N64; they were outdone by PC games that pushed the hardware harder than something designed for the N64 could. Today of course most major (shooter/console-style/etc.) PC games are scaled to the capabilities of the consoles of today, but back in the '90s PC games actually pushed the hardware much more often.

Look at Turoks 1 and 2 on GameRankings, for example.

Turok 1 - N64: 85.83% ; PC: 80%
Turok 2 - N64: 88.96%; PC: 72.79%

PC Gamer scored the games even lower than the few reviews in those GameRankings averages -- I just looked them up in the reviews database on one of my PCG CDs (because I can't find this info online...), and PCG gave Turok 1 a 68% and Turok 2 a 64%. I trusted PCG in the '90s, and rarely bought games they scored so low. Same game. Better graphics on PC (though the fog is the same). Worse scores. This is probably part of why I somewhat overlooked the Turok games at the time -- I saw PC Gamer's review of the PC port where they called it average, and didn't think it'd be nearly as good as it is, once I finally played the game many years later on N64.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Tomb Raider looks good with hardware 3d acceleration, but without it, no way. It looks more like the PS1/Saturn versions that way, which is rough looking. I played a lot of computer games back then. Software 3d looked UGLY, and the framerates were often not great either. As for Quake, the game looked great for the time, but certainly looked a lot better once better 3d cards came available... most notably the 3DFX Voodoo1, which released at the end of '96. But even after that, you had to actually have the card to get the benefits of it. Without one, you were suffering like I was all the way until the end of 1998, trying to play some 3d games on that abysmal S3 ViRGE thing and its worse framerates in "accelerated" mode than software, poor graphics in software mode, etc.

Tomb Raider looks fine on PC and the PS1. On the Saturn you do have some bad pixelization though. Possibly due to worse textures being used. Is it filtered? No, but does it look bad on the PS1 and PC? No, it looks fine.

Just saying, the texture resolutions aren't as big of an advantage as you make it sound considering the resolution of PS1 or Saturn textures. Those textures, versus filtered ones? It's a matter of taste really.

Texture resolution is a big advantage when the gap is as big as it is between the N64 and the PS1/Saturn. Here's a direct comparison between an N64 game and it's PS1 equivalent:



Try and tell me the PS1 shot looks worse because it's not filtered. Just try.

There's no benefits to that filtering at all. Most of the detail is lost and it's a blurry mess. The PS1 shot looks leaps and bounds better.

Cherrypicked images don't really prove your point you know, they are not exactly representative of the system. But anyway, of course there are blocky textures in that picture -- see the hand of the person on the right, for example. You aren't great at seeing pixelated textures, are you.

Sorry but that hand is not pixelated. You can clearly tell it's a hand and see the individual fingers, nails, etc. Just because you can see the individual pixels that make up an image does not mean it's pixelated. I can't bash this point over your head enough times apparently.

This is an example of a pixelated texture:



The texture in the red box is pixelated. It's so distorted and low resolution you can't tell what the hell it's supposed to be. The rest of the textures in the shot look fine though. The Virtua Fighter Remix texture isn't pixelated by any means as you can now see.

As for cherry picking shots, here's a few more just to show the game always looks that clean:







As you can see, no noticeable pixelation in sight.

Sorry, but it IS revolutionary to do something that has not previously been done in the field you're working in.

But as pointed out, it was previously done in Arcade and Computer hardware. Sega's Model 2 board was doing that in 1993. And it's in the same field, 3D Video game rendering.

There is absolutely no proof behind anything you say here. Nintendo and SGI themselves said that they put the filtering in to get rid of visible pixels, because they thought 3d graphics looked better without them. I believe that that was indeed the reason for it. Your reasoning here is entirely backwards, twisted against Nintendo. As for the low texture quality, the original idea was to do something like Mario 64, with mostly shaded environments with only scattered textures. It was an annoying oversight for sure, but every time you mention it you massive4ly overstate how big of a problem it is, while rarely mentioning the major downsides of the other systems' 3d.

Nintendo and SGI may have said it to investors and the press, but that doesn't mean every single person who bought an N64 knew they said that or were pushing it. This was before the internet took off and we had live streams of this stuff you idiot. Most people probably had no idea what texture filtering really was back then nor did they give a damn. They were more impressed by the fact they were playing 3D Mario.

As for me overstating how big of a problem it is, you overstate how big of an advantage it was. Texture Filtering is nice to have, but the N64's implementation of it falls flat on it's face. The first console to do it well and actually show off it's benefits was the Dreamcast if you ask me.

Are you seriously saying that you think that the exact same graphical styles look equally good in both 2d and 3d? You'd be pretty much the only one, then.

Oh for fucks sake, are you completely incapable of understanding an example? The point is not that it's originally a sprite. The point is that the N64 is not using textures as high of quality as what the Saturn and PS1 are using. A texture is just a 2D image that get's applied to a polygon. It can be whatever the hell you want it to be (hint, most 2D games on the N64 are made up of just single polygons with a texture). Style doesn't matter. The point that was being illustrated that your fanboy goggles wont let you comprehend is that a higher quality texture will usually look better than a heavily filtered lower quality texture. N64 vs Saturn/PS1 isn't just filtered versus unfiltered. If it was we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's poor quality heavily filtered textures versus higher quality unfiltered textures. Most people here seem to agree the latter looks better.

Most 3d games aren't just made of giant cubes, so this is an irrelevant comparison. And regardless, it depends on the game, the art quality, etc.

As usual, you miss the fucking point to instead make a desperate attempt to invalidate an argument so you don't have to deal with it.

I'm not confusing anything, you just seem to be unable to see blocky, pixelated textures when you're staring at them. That makes it hard to discuss this issue... For one thing, when you have low-rez graphics like most 3d Saturn games use (for the actual in-game resolution), you're going to have blockyness; this has to be on of the reasons why games on both PS1 and Saturn often look blockier on Saturn, the lower resolutions. Of course the absence of any filtering is another issue that both platforms share; it makes their textures look pixelated compared to N64 textures.

No, you seem to think if you can see a pixel, it's pixelated. That's not the case. See the Shining the Holy Ark image I posted above. That's an example of a pixelated texture. What you're pointing at and screaming "pixelated!" isn't pixelated at all.

That supposed "N64 texture quality" version, the N64 can do textures a lot better than that. And anyway, you don't get a decent lower-rez (or higher-rez) texture by just downscaling (or upscaling) the texture, you have to redraw it to fit the new resolution.

We're talking about the norm though. Sure if you completely reprogram how the thing works it can do better, but your typical N64 games don't. Which is why the PS1 and Saturn usually have better quality textures.

As for downscaling you would expect them to redraw it, but when you're on a tight deadline and you have to make those textures fit into that pitiful cache at any cost, you downscale. The textures definitely weren't redrawn for a lot of those N64 games. They were quickly downscaled, and it shows.

I accounted for everything you say here in my initial statement, so there's really nothing else to say here other than that you're ignoring at least half of what I said. So to repeat myself, there are two main reasons why the N64 has so few 3d games. The first one is because it was the beginning of the time where 2d games were considered lesser games not worthy of getting much attention, and the second is because the N64's higher game publishing costs made publishers unwilling to release many games that weren't aimed at the widest audience -- that is, 3d games, because of reason #1. The PS1 had much lower publishing costs, to making little games that the largest audience wouldn't care about was more feasible.

And I'm saying the first reason is complete and utter bullshit, because a very large portion of the Saturn and PS1's 2D game libraries were released AFTER the N64 came out. If that first reason was valid, we would have seem the same trend on those systems. We didn't. Publishing cost may have been an issue, but that would have affected all games, not just 2D ones.

In short, your argument doesn't hold water and doesn't reflect the actual facts of the situation.

Sure, because of the low resolutions involved the N64 has some jaggies, but I'm sure it's less than the PS1 on the whole... and anyway, regardless of having a few more jaggies, the N64 shot in that comparison clearly looks better than the PS1 one does.

Yet that shot shows more jaggies. Mariokart 64 has quite a few jaggies when played on the real system as well. And no, the PS1 shot looks better in that comparison. It's not blurry and there's more texture detail and background detail.

If the other systems could do that, PS1 and Saturn games would have games with software mip-mapping, software perspective correction, software Z-buffering, etc etc, I would think. They don't. There is a reason for that -- the PS1 and Saturn aren't nearly powerful enough, either in their CPUs or their graphics chip(s), to keep up with the N64.

There ARE PS1 games with software Z-buffering. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other software implementations of those other effects too. The Saturn wasn't around long enough for us to know if it could do it or not. Though I think ThSonicRetard once mentioned that Burning Rangers did some pretty crazy software stuff. So again, I wouldn't be surprised if it could do it.

We've covered this before, but while it's certainly a lot worse on the PS1, the Saturn (and 3DO) do also have perspective issues, particularly in the middle of textures. Recall that video where those ex-3DO developers talk about perspective issues on the 3DO; the Saturn is the same.

I know it's still there on the Saturn. But it's not nearly as big of an issue. Unless you know exactly what to look for, you wont notice it.

No, no, the N64 has RDRAM, RAMBUS's type of RAM. It was a somewhat popular kind of RAM in the mid '90s to early '00s, and has some significant advantages over regular SDRAM like the other systems have. It does have longer access times, but it makes up for it with very fast read times -- so it takes longer to put stuff into RAM, but while reading something from memory, it'll be a lot faster than with regular RAM of the time. Nintendo, Sony, and Intel all saw the advantages of RDRAM over SDRAM and used it as the main system RAM in a system they made during that time -- Nintendo in the N64, Sony in the PS2 (yes, the PS2 uses RDRAM if you had forgotten), and Intel in early Pentium 4 PC motherboards. My old computer, from early 2001, is one of those RDRAM P4 systems. RDRAM costs more than regular RAM (when I added RAM to that P4 in 2002, I probably paid twice what I would have if it had regular RAM!), but the speed boost was worth it.

Oh -- RDRAM is also the reason for the need for that connector block that comes in the N64 if you haven't added an Expansion Pak into the system. While normal RAM allows slots to be empty, in RDRAM systems for some reason you have to fill the empty slots with blanks like that. In PCs RDRAM is also always paired, so each of the two pairs of RAM slots have to have identical RAM strips in them in my old PC.

Again, trade offs. There's quite a few sources out there of developers complaining about those slower access times. And again, by the time the PS2 and Pentium 4 came along those issues could have been addressed so they weren't as bad as the N64. And that's not even getting into the other issues it has. The N64 like the SNES before it is riddled with bottlenecks. I think ChillyWilly once said that even if you threw a CD ROM drive on the N64 it still wouldn't help much because all the bottlenecks.

It doesn't at all. You're so, so biased against the N64...

I'm not biased against it. I actually do enjoy the system. I just don't care for your over the top fanboy bullshit.

I don't know what magazines you were reading, but the magazines I was reading -- mostly Nintendo Power, for console gaming news, along with PC Gamer for PC stuff but they wouldn't have talked about the N64 of course -- certainly mentioned this, more than a few times. Are you REALLY saying that before the internet companies could not hype up their systems and talk about its hardware features? What? You must know how much nonsense that is. You don't need a video to make the point that video does; screenshots of that dolphin demo sufficed, and helped build up the hype for the system's graphical potential to unreasonable levels (for what a $200 system could do).

Show me a commercial where Nintendo is going "Look kids! You can zoom into this texture and it doesn't get pixelated!" I'm not saying companies couldn't hype up their systems. I'm saying that texture filtering was not something Nintendo was hyping to their consumers with the N64. It was "LOOK! 3D MARIO! LOOK! 3D GRAPHICS! LOOK! 3D!"

Eh, it'd be nice to have more games on the N64, but ultimately, it's not important. The games the N64 has are great. Other systems do those genres well. Again, systems don't need to represent every kind of game in order to be a great system. They just have to have games you think are really great.

"These Genres don't matter because the N64 doesn't have a good representation of them!"

Nice. Why not just address the elephant in the room? The N64's RPG, Shmup, Fighting, and 2D library is horrible. Most of what it has is garbage save for one or two gems. No one is going to think of getting an N64 for those genres.

I would not call textures like those you see in most PS1 or Saturn games good by any stretch of the imagination. They aren't, at all. N64 filtering doesn't look great either, but it's not worse most of the time.

Sure by Dreamcast standards they're not. But for 5th Generation consoles they're pretty damn good. They're definitely better than what you see on the N64.

Grandia is a game with nice 2d sprites on top of 3d environments. The art design is great, but the game is seriously held back by the really ugly polygonal 3d! The sprites look fine, and the art design is, again, good, but the 3d, from the models to the textures to everything else, is just so rough looking. I'd say the Lunar remakes look a lot better, since they stick with entirely 2d graphics. Grandia definitely looks better on Saturn than PS1 (I have both versions, and the Digital Museum disc for Saturn as well -- Grandia is a really good game!), but it still looks rough and blocky on Saturn.

The Polygons look fine for the time, the textures look fine for the time too. Again though you dodged the question. What specifically looks bad in that shot?

As for that shot in particular, I've probably said this before (because that shot has been posted before), but what's going on with those insanely jagged shadows? They look AWFUL! Of course the shot is very low-resolution and blocky, too, the games' biggest issue visually.

The Shadows in Grandia are either done by polygons, or in that particular shot a a texture. Basically the shadows are intentionally supposed to look like that. It's to try and simulate the rough edges of some of the buidlings, as well as the rough surface of the ground they're on. If you're in an area with smooth terrain and more basic structures, the shadows become straight edged:



Funny how when you go on about art style in regards to texture filtering, you completely ignore it when it comes to the Saturn and PS1.

Cherrypicked shots can look okay, sure... but also, warping is something that's hard to see from a still image, versus a video. You can't see a texture warp when it's not moving, really, even for PS1 games where it's a horrible problem. As for broken polygon seams, sure, that's a lot worse on PS1 than Saturn. I was referring to both systems there, not just the Saturn. And despite having less warping and not many of those broken polygon seams, few people would say (though I'm sure some people here do!) that Saturn 3d looks better than PS1 3d, because of other advantages the PS1 has -- higher resolutions in many games, transparencies and other effects, probably higher polygon counts, etc etc.

Again, I can provide more shots from those games and they will still look just as good. The games don't suffer from poor quality pixelated textures because they don't use poor quality pixelated textures. As for texture warping, you can so take a pixture of it. I can't find it right now but I think Black_Tiger posted in one of these threads a shot of Tomb Raider on the PS1 with severe texture distortion and made a jab "Behold the PS1's inability to draw a straight line!"

As for Saturn vs PS1 3D, there are some High Resolution Saturn games out there, some of which are higher resolution than you see on the PS1. Virtua Fighter 2 and Dead or Alive come to mind immediately. Transparencies and blending is really the big issue between the two when it comes to what they can do in 3D.

As for those games, Virtua Cop certainly benefits from the railed nature of the game, and that most action takes place on static (not moving) screens. I'm sure the rails allow them to make the graphics look a lot nicer than they would look if you could walk around in those environments. As for the other two, I'm sure you'd notice the expected issues in motion, in Sonic R in particular because it has much more complex environments -- remember that the Saturn VF games have 2d backdrops.

Ok, let's look at them in motion:







Any Pixelation? Nope.
Any Texture Warping? Nope.
Any broken seams? Nope.

[gamevet]

You are wasting your time trying to have an intelligent conversation with ABF. He deflects or denies everything that shows that he is wrong. He's quite the moron.

[NeoZeedeater]

I don't know what magazines you were reading, but the magazines I was reading -- mostly Nintendo Power, for console gaming news,

Probably not the best thing to admit.

[A Black Falcon]

Probably not the best thing to admit.

What? Why would you say that? For people with Nintendo consoles as I was, there was no better source of console game news. NP was a very good magazine, not just some PR mouthpiece like some company-owned magazines were. Their reviews did not go easy on games.

Plus, it was free! NP was the only gaming magazine my local library subscribed to, and they did that all the way from the early '90s until at least the mid '00s, so I could read it free. I did subscribe for two years from early '95 to early '97, but the rest of the time I read it from the library. If the library had gotten EGM or GamePro or something too, I'd have read that a lot more I am sure, but they did not.

You are wasting your time trying to have an intelligent conversation with ABF. He deflects or denies everything that shows that he is wrong.

Before writing this quite stupid trolling insult, did you actually read Trekkies' posts? There is someone in this discussion being stubbornly biased, and it's not me.

To simplify things, he is saying that he is objectively right, while I am saying that it is a subjective issue where personal opinion is the key factor. And the screenshots and videos he's posted prove my point. It is very obviously a subjective issue.

I admit I'm wrong when I am proven wrong about something. I happens sometimes. But you can't prove subjective opinions on issues which don't have an "objective right answer" wrong, you know. You can try to make an argument to convince someone to the other side, but just repeating "I'm right and you're wrong" on matters of opinion turns things into a circular argument like this one.

[saturndual32]

Plus, it was free! NP was the only gaming magazine my local library subscribed to, and they did that all the way from the early '90s until at least the mid '00s, so I could read it free. I did subscribe for two years from early '95 to early '97, but the rest of the time I read it from the library. If the library had gotten EGM or GamePro or something too, I'd have read that a lot more I am sure, but they did not.

They had videogame mags at your library?, cool!. Thats unheard off, were i live, hehe.

[NeoZeedeater]

What? Why would you say that?

Because you have a reputation for Nintendo system bias here so getting most of your console gaming news from Nintendo Power instead of a multi-format mag doesn't help that image (my post wasn't totally serious anyway).

[BladeJunker]

Can we stop saying low "quality" and stick to saying low resolution, looking at you A Black Falcon. Quality is too broad an adjective when what we're really talking about is how many pixels are actually in the texture maps, the pixel resolution or texel resolution if you want to get really anal.

You can filter all live long day on any hardware that supports it whether software or hardware based but when the texture map is too low in resolution it WASHES OUT, all that love and care put into the texture gone. It's like if someone spilled water all over your water color painting you just put 4 hours into.

If you can get the texture resolution up to 1 pixel per square inch on N64 the filtering greatly enhances the visuals because the detail is still visible but on N64 that usually wasn't the case, we're talking 1 pixel per 2,3,4+ square inches which is WAY too large no matter how much you filter it. Other than using the Expansion Pak to compensate this texture resolution gulf it was really hard to get the textures to not look like ass after filtering, it was premature of Nintendo to even have that feature without the texture memory and cache to back it up.

It's not like the PS1 or Saturn were drowning in texture memory, nobody ever has on a console, but given how low resolution ALL the textures were at that point on consoles it would have at least been a nice option on N64 to be able to turn off the filtering when the textures are like 16X16 pixels. As anyone who's tried PS1 games on PS2 or better, texture filtering really isn't that magical.
It's not like you can't get good graphics through a N64, it's just that Nintendo made it way too hard to achieve than they should have. If the N64 actually behaved like PC 3D accelerator we wouldn't even be having this discussion but it was extremely conditional to get it to perform well so we're just debating apples & oranges just like the Snes VS Mega Drive debates IE. you want color or speed.

ABF what the heck do you have against pixels, they're a basic element of video game graphics, it's like hating water or steel, why do you think it's so bad to see them? I come across lots of people like this who seem "offended" by the sight of pixels in retro graphics no less , employing all kinds of filters, external hardware, emulation, clone systems to run away from the fact that game graphics are just a bunch of pixels when all is said and done. If all you want is to not see pixels, you win the N64 has filtering.


I actually had Nintendo Power at my library but they stopped not long ago, I can't afford the space or money for mags anymore so I was sad they stopped. Still thumbs up for libraries as they are still a vital institution iPad people. As far as impartial magazine reviews in magazines dedicated to a specific console ROFL, every magazine about one console can never be impartial by default.
For me Nintendo Power was just for coverage, reading about what was coming out, the reviews gravitated between bland and false praising like most "independent" magazines and still fall into that place.
Still I'll take Nintendo Power over most of what's left of gaming magazines these days, other shit looks and reads like Esquire these days. I want my childish looking magazines back please.

[gamevet]

Before writing this quite stupid trolling insult, did you actually read Trekkies' posts? There is someone in this discussion being stubbornly biased, and it's not me.

I'm stating the facts. Trekkies brought up some very valid points and put a lot of effort into showing you why you are wrong, yet you stubbornly refuse (pretty much crapped on his post) to accept any of the facts he has as being right. You have a reputation for it beyond anyone else on this site. You also have a hall of shame that several of us keep in our signatures, because they are flat-out ignorant comments. I think I'm going to rep Trekkies, because he deserves it for all of the effort he put into those posts, only to have them crapped on.

SNES games all use pixels (technically, every PC game has pixels) to draw their images. When a game uses Mode 7 on the SNES, those pixels become (stretched) pixelated and something that was once made up of 8 x 8 pixels could be as large as 16 x 16 pixels by doubling each pixel.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Pixe...odOg8BgA&dpr=1

Here's an example of good textures from a Playstation game being enhanced by AA with Bleemcast. This is how AA was meant to be used, to enhance the image quality of the textures, not hide the image quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-tQX-XZhX0

[Black_Tiger]

Can we stop saying low "quality" and stick to saying low resolution, looking at you A Black Falcon. Quality is too broad an adjective when what we're really talking about is how many pixels are actually in the texture maps, the pixel resolution or texel resolution if you want to get really anal.

You can filter all live long day on any hardware that supports it whether software or hardware based but when the texture map is too low in resolution it WASHES OUT, all that love and care put into the texture gone. It's like if someone spilled water all over your water color painting you just put 4 hours into.

If you can get the texture resolution up to 1 pixel per square inch on N64 the filtering greatly enhances the visuals because the detail is still visible but on N64 that usually wasn't the case, we're talking 1 pixel per 2,3,4+ square inches which is WAY too large no matter how much you filter it. Other than using the Expansion Pak to compensate this texture resolution gulf it was really hard to get the textures to not look like ass after filtering, it was premature of Nintendo to even have that feature without the texture memory and cache to back it up.

It's not like the PS1 or Saturn were drowning in texture memory, nobody ever has on a console, but given how low resolution ALL the textures were at that point on consoles it would have at least been a nice option on N64 to be able to turn off the filtering when the textures are like 16X16 pixels. As anyone who's tried PS1 games on PS2 or better, texture filtering really isn't that magical.
It's not like you can't get good graphics through a N64, it's just that Nintendo made it way too hard to achieve than they should have. If the N64 actually behaved like PC 3D accelerator we wouldn't even be having this discussion but it was extremely conditional to get it to perform well so we're just debating apples & oranges just like the Snes VS Mega Drive debates IE. you want color or speed.

ABF what the heck do you have against pixels, they're a basic element of video game graphics, it's like hating water or steel, why do you think it's so bad to see them? I come across lots of people like this who seem "offended" by the sight of pixels in retro graphics no less , employing all kinds of filters, external hardware, emulation, clone systems to run away from the fact that game graphics are just a bunch of pixels when all is said and done. If all you want is to not see pixels, you win the N64 has filtering.


I actually had Nintendo Power at my library but they stopped not long ago, I can't afford the space or money for mags anymore so I was sad they stopped. Still thumbs up for libraries as they are still a vital institution iPad people. As far as impartial magazine reviews in magazines dedicated to a specific console ROFL, every magazine about one console can never be impartial by default.
For me Nintendo Power was just for coverage, reading about what was coming out, the reviews gravitated between bland and false praising like most "independent" magazines and still fall into that place.
Still I'll take Nintendo Power over most of what's left of gaming magazines these days, other shit looks and reads like Esquire these days. I want my childish looking magazines back please.

We've had endless discussions describing the many aspects of the N64's texture issues. Summerizing by something like "quality" saves us from rehashing the details. It's not just a resolution thing. There's the excessive tiling, small swatches stretched painfully far, lack of variety, etc... all before it gets filtered.

There are some games with nice sharp textures which don't look pixelated for the resolution. Most just happened to be on PSX/Saturn.