Why PlayStation 1 Graphics Warped and Wobbled so much | MVG

[@roberte2945]

4:12 Man, Perfect Dark looks more Italian than I remember.

[@credit0880]

aaah mate so true

[@pezz8266]

Mistakes were made,

[@Mireaze]

It's probably just regional differences

[@ttkftykyfts]

lmao...

[@x3mbr]

Giovanna Dark

[@clever-username]

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” ― Brian Eno

[@stepone76]

s0o0o0o0o0o-----you like the sound lol

[@michalzustak8846]

"CD distortion" Not a feature of the CD format at all. It's only a consequence of poor mastering that was done during the "loudness wars" to make songs as loud as possible. CD can have beautiful, dynamic sound and indeed, 1980s CDs generally had good mastering as CD was an audiophile format back then.

[@michaelmicoowoods712]

Haha I love some 8 bit sounds shinobi ❤️

[@druffthewolf3830]

So true.

[@henryfleischer404]

I wonder if video compression artifacts will be like that for my generation.

[@lurkerrekrul]

80s/90s Gamer - How can I improve the image and get a sharper picture? 2010s Emulation Gamer - How can I make the image blurry like the good old days?

[@Nicky_T]

lurkerrekrul brother we’re in the 2020’s now

[@lurkerrekrul]

Yes, but this trend of trying to duplicate the flaws of a CRT display started years ago.

[@lurkerrekrul]

@poonishd snek - I agree. The most important thing is that the emulator runs the games accurately. Luckily the emulators for the Playstation and most systems that came before it, are pretty accurate (although there are exceptions). Emulators for the later systems, like the PS2 can be hit & miss. Many games work, but there are some that don't. When the emulators work well, I think they're a great way to explore older games. You can use any controller you like and you can use save states to get past tough spots in the game and avoid clunky save systems. Although you should always use the official save method before quitting the game (if there is one).

[@Nicky_T]

lurkerrekrul my bad I’m retarded

[@lurkerrekrul]

@poonishd snek - I use PCSX2 v1.40. I know there are newer beta versions, but I have an old system and they don't run for me. That said, here are a few of the problems I've run into; Lemony Snicket's A Series if Unfortunately Events - You can't pick up items. I think there was a setting to fix that, but the graphics also look extremely blurry for me unless I use software mode. Spider-Man 3 - Hangs on the loading screen when you start the game. Ultimate Spider-Man - Crashes during the opening FMV. Cold Fear - Crashes at random points. Spider-Man 2, Transformers (2004) and others - Have to be run in software rendered mode, which is far slower than hardware mode. Star Wars Bounty Hunter - Needs special settings to avoid severe graphical glitches. Burnout series - Most need you to start the race in software mode to fix the sky, then switch back to hardware mode once the race starts. Only has to be done once per session. The sun is always visible through other objects (tunnels, trees, buildings, etc). Portal Runner - Same fix as Burnout or some graphics will be missing. Fatal Frame - The ghosts don't show up in hardware mode. Don't get me wrong, it's a great emulator and it runs most games in a very playable state, assuming your system is fast enough, but there are still a few games that don't work properly. I also ran into a bunch of games that wouldn't run when trying the Dreamcast emulator. However there are newer versions that probably work better, but which I can't run due to my old system.

[@metcaelfe]

I never realised how much mip mapping caused Perfect Dark to appear so similar to Mario 64

[@marcwilliams9824]

Ha ha. Took me until 4 minutes into the video before I got the joke.

[@sovo1212]

@@marcwilliams9824 And thanks to you, I went to the 4 minutes mark, then I got the joke.

[@edwardperkins1225]

I remember the texture wobble being a lot more bothersome than a little edge jitter. Particularly when a line is supposed to be be straight in a texture the affine transformation looks like a graphical gitch. At worst it felt like the PS1 couldn't draw a straight line. N64 owner's definitely felt proper texture perspective was a reason their console was better at the time. Never knew it was the lack of a z-buffer that led to this.

[@victorcoda]

@@edwardperkins1225 Perspective-correct texture mapping requires a lot of FPU math, so it was dropped.

[@edwardperkins1225]

@@victorcoda So nothing to do with the Z-buffer? I thought that was suggested in the video. I'd think the per pixel depth from the Z-buffer would help in knowing how to draw the texturres. Is that not so?

[@MichaelPohoreski]

When I worked on _Need for Speed_ for the PS1 I remember our two graphics guys (Brad and Laurent) trying to find the right balance between dynamically subdividing triangles close to the camera to minimize affine texture mapping warping (aka "texture swimming") vs the extra overhead of geometry.

[@ka-md8ue]

Did you work on NFS HS PS version?

[@MichaelPohoreski]

@@ka-md8ue No, only the first PSX version.

[@TheBoofGod]

@@ka-md8ue right I'm playin that as we speak and I have questions about high stakes as well

[@mutalix]

Wow amazing!

[@Solisium-Channel]

You are an interesting person

[@shortcat]

You forgot to mention the main reason why textures look different: texture filtering algorithm. N64 used 3-point bilinear filter and PS1 used nearest neighbor. it's why PS1 textures are blocky as apposed to blurry n64 ones. Filtering is what affects textures of objects that are close to the screen and it is separate thing from mipmapping: you could have nearest neighbour filtering with mipmaps or bilinear filtering without mipmaps too. Mipmapping mainly affects distant textures, its purpose is to prevent textures whose pixel size is smaller than screen buffer pixel size to alias and shimmer.

[@AngDavies]

He touches on it about 8:30, not sure it would have done much without floating point, or even have been possible if your geometry is warping all about the place

[@bobdylan1968]

@Get a peace! the filtering wasnt the problem. N64s hardware was just superior across the board. Would have looked miles better had there been higher storage capacity for the 64.

[@bobdylan1968]

@@jiijijjijiijiij yeah.. and sony had its benefits when it came to the size and scope of games purely because of data. But. We are talking graphics here. And in that sense its just not a competition.

[@blubblurb]

And probably also space. There was just much more space on cd than on cartridge.

[@AngDavies]

@@bobdylan1968 there were other issues with the n64 other than its lack of storage- its texture cache was very small, worsened by the fact that accessing memory from the gpu was very slow untill later in the lifecycle of the console. The memory issues causing severe bottlenecks meant the beefier hardware was very hard to make worthwile, even underperforming the PS1 in real terms. That "muddy" texture complaint on the n64 was often valid, and little to do with bilinear filtering- more that the texture resolution had to be reduced to get around memory issues.

[@joshsmith7521]

The wobble was something I always noticed back in the day but never really gave a second thought. Just thought it was part of the experience

[@turrican4d599]

The moment, the Voodoo Graphics card was available, I stopped buying games for my PS1.

[@YoYo-uh3xj]

@@turrican4d599 who do you voodoo?

[@RJARRRPCGP]

@Josh Smith The PlayStation 1, appears to shimmer, much like I sometimes saw in new games, IIRC. When I had my Radeon RX 5600 XT, before the VBIOS got screwed up, I was getting shimmering and it made me nervous, wondering if it was video corruption caused by a GPU defect or a VRAM defect. At least it's not the same as "warping" in Halo Custom Edition on PC, where a Warthog skips on the screen.

[@lancethrust9488]

GOING FROM MEGADRIVE 2D TO 3D PS1 WAS THE BIGGEST WOW FACTOR IN GAMING HISTORY , THE GENZ PUNKS DONT EVEN KNOW THEY GET NEW CONSOLES PS2 TO PS3 TO PS4 TO PS5 NOBODY WOULD OF BEEN BLOWN AWAY WITH THOSE IMPROVEMENTS , BUT PS1 WAS BIGGEST GAME CHANGER !!!!

[@SeranaKnight]

@@YoYo-uh3xj you do

[@jaceybella1267]

As a kid I was always mildly disturbed by the "movement" in the walls of ps1 games. It had a horror element to it, like the walls were alive in most of the games I played. Didn't deter me, as I loved my games! But I remember that glitching effect actually being in childhood nightmares of mine

[@saronbennett]

Have you ever tried psychedelic mushrooms? :D

[@jaceybella1267]

@@saronbennett no but I've heard good things lmao

[@saronbennett]

The walls/ trees will appear to be breathing. When I did them for the first time in high school I was in my friends yard. It was like a tunnel of breathing bushes and flowers lol

[@inimicalintent8825]

Yeah the warping effect worked well for horror games like silent hill iMO

[@ericfieldman]

I can't do anything yet, but I'd love to make a horror game, and if I did, one of the ideas I had was to use primitive rendering effects (super original) and then eventually transition from something that's really simplified to something way more detailed or realistic so the difference is jarring and uncanny. If I ever get around to that I'll keep the moving walls in mind

[@horsthacker6355]

I will never forget the day i got my ps1.... even with just he demos...it was so glorious. How little was needed to get blown away back then.

[@nabilyar]

Demo one. The skating downhill. Someone stole it when I took it to school.

[@__________8146]

Demos were the best back then. :D

[@aaronwalderslade]

Demo 1 had Lifeforce Tenka and a game with little ships called Overboard. When the Official PS Mag came out with the metal gear demo I nearly wet myself with excitement. I always though PlayStation power was a better mag than the official once but I always bought both. I was so sad when the magazines closed. It felt like a community and the journalists felt like our team leaders. And there was such a sense of FUN.

[@DharmaRotary]

it was so spectacular because all the other rivals that time like nintendo where almost absolute junk and keept standards low for years and years mean imagine like just 3 car brands this world , Fiat , Ford and Lexus

[@salvadordollyparton666]

@@DharmaRotary Lexus...🤨 You mean, Toyota? Not to mention, that's not even the right big 3.

[@phirenz]

I've done some research into the "why" question. The primary reason is that skipping those features allowed Sony to put something on the shelves a full 18 months before their competition. Cost would be a secondary reason.

[@ultimatejoe71617]

Exactly they were first to market. Makes absolute sense

[@ZeldaTheSwordsman]

Secondary, but not minor, considering the pennies pinched elsewhere. That rush to the market is the main way it beat the Saturn; or rather, Sega's reaction to that rush is why the Saturn lost. Sega's dipshit marketers responded to Sony's rush by dashing their own company's console out to the shelves as soon as it was done... despite the lack of a game library to go with it. Meaning the Saturn got off to a bad start that it never really recovered from. And unfortunately, Sega didn't learn their lesson from that fiasco and restrict the marketing department's power.

[@codahighland]

I think another part of it would be performance. Fixed-point math is a LOT faster than floating-point, and affine transformations are similarly a LOT faster than perspective transformations, and in both cases the required logic is quite a bit simpler as well. Developing a floating-point vector processor that supported perspective transformations would have added substantial costs and significantly increased production time while running a concurrent risk that the games would perform worse. Not supporting mipmapping or z-buffering is probably more a matter of memory capacity and bandwidth. Memory capacity could be mitigated by spending more money on video RAM, but there's less you can do to improve memory bandwidth once the CPU is selected. Given that loading times are already a major problem for Playstation, making it worse by increasing the amount of graphical data that would need to be managed would certainly not be a good idea. (Also, contrary to the video, mipmapping is actually meant to AVOID visual artifacts -- but most automatically generated mipmaps just do simple bilinear scaling instead of having each level of detail be drawn to suit, which results in textures that look blurry. But in general being blurry at a distance is better than chaotic pixel noise from numerically-unstable texture sampling -- the video is right about that.)

[@sharpcone]

@@codahighland I'm just wondering. Is ALU only GPU a common place at the time? Or is it just PS One? Modern GPUs are mostly consisted of FPUs instead of ALUs. Modern game engine also use floating point on almost all of its calculations.

[@codahighland]

@@sharpcone FPUs are a type of ALU, so that's not really a meaningful question. It has always been common to use external hardware to make math faster, and graphics are a very common thing that has math that needs accelerated.

[@MetalJesusRocks]

Fascinating! I always wondered this myself, especially as you mentioned in the video, when you go back and play those games today. It's very noticeable.

[@retrosoul8770]

Games later in the lifecycle of the system were improved compared to earlier efforts. Just look at Einhander (an incredible shooter btw), or Omega Boost, Ridge Racer Type 4, Tekken 3, Disruptor, Colony Wars Vengeance, the amazing Quake II port etc. There's a good handful of great lookers by the standards of the generation. Esp on a Crt with S-Video at least, good image quality and sharp textures relative to the time (unlike most N64 games).

[@rars0n]

It's much more noticeable because of the display you're using. Back in the day, on a regular CRT TV with at best RCA connections, it wasn't nearly as problematic. I kind of prefer playing these types of games on older monitors for that reason, or just correcting some of the graphical problems through emulation.

[@devonholden6292]

I'm gonna be that guy. MetalJesus?! You watch MVG's channel, too?

[@rars0n]

@@devonholden6292 I'm pretty sure most of these guys watch most of these channels, not only because they enjoy gaming but also so they don't make the same video that someone else already made.

[@sparcx86channel42]

you play arcade games on LCD you won't see the difference.

[@dr07828]

I think the 2 main reasons Sony omitted the features was that 1. it brought the cost down. 2. Most people were still using CRT TV's and with the scan lines and blurryness, it hid a lot of the issues cause from not having the omitted features. You can even see most of the amazing graphics of the N64 on a crt. I personally didn't realize retro arch fixed those issues, I did notice that PS1 games looked really good on it. But I use a filter that adds the scan lines. so it looks amazing.

[@Yupppi]

Not a bad point. I've seen some games behave badly on modern monitors, basically devs relied on crt's to do a lot of heavy lifting in making their game nicer than the hardware allowed. The crt's really pulled their weight.

[@FokkeWulfe]

Is it worth using the filter? I've never used it but I'd love to remove a bit of the "squareness" of the graphics on an emulator. Also sorry if it's a silly question. I'm a bit new to emulators.

[@dr07828]

The filter makes it look like it should. And it looks so much better. So yes.

[@FokkeWulfe]

@@dr07828 cool. I'll try that next time im on my emulator

[@jakeroon]

@@FokkeWulfe this advice is dead on. I'll never forget how depressed I was to buy on of those hot new LCD amazing definition tv's to play my ps2 on when they first came out. Only to get it hooked up and to my HORROR it made my games look much much much worse! Another thing this video did not adress is LCD twisting. The way an LCD works is by twisting the crystals to make the image. The video did mention how the ps1 was fast, well: it was far too fast for these Lcd's twist rate to keep up with. (and still is in many cases).

[@AbacusManify]

I don't remember that Perfect Dark level...

[@BIG_CLARKY]

Yeah lol me neither.

[@ThatTonnatoTenrec]

Probably just a regional difference.

[@ucitymetalhead]

Ya just had to find a bathroom stand on a toilet and press down.

[@sh0ryualfa393]

Issa secret level lmao 😂

[@Rendo86]

tbh I don't remeber it running that smoothly

[@DannyWilliamH]

First time I saw a Playstation it truly changed my view of what a game could be. I'm an 80s baby so I came of age in the 90s. My first console was an NES and then I got a Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) for the 16bit gen. I somehow missed the start of the next gen and the Playstation entirely. About a year after launch in NA and I didn't even know it existed! One night my older brother comes home from his friend's house with a giant box. I'm playing a Genesis game and he just stands there with this box. He looks at me and says "You gotta see this. Turn that off" I do and he sets the box down to reveal a Playstation with about 10 games in those MASSIVE jewel cases before they switched to the smaller, "normal sized" ones. It looked like alien technology to me 😅 Our friend's dad had been given the the console and games as repayment for a loan or something but they were N64 users. It had just been sitting there so they let my brother borrow it. (Btw, it was the OG model with the composite outputs). We plug it in and the first game we play is a little title I never heard of called "Resident Evil". My brother says something to the effect of "you have no idea how cool this is" as he closes the disc tray and I'm just staring at the back of the case in disbelief that any game could look so cool. It starts and... It.Blew.My.Fn.Skull.Apart. First an FMV that was so much cleaner than my old Sega CD FMVs. Then the game starts and it truly felt like a movie. The awful voice acting and odd controls weren't even noticed because it was like playing a horror movie! Actually playing a movie! The younger viewers cannot have this stressed enough that games were one thing before that console generation and they began to be what you know now within that generation so thoroughly dominated by PS1 & N64. Games themselves changed. We must have played it for 8 straight hours. I recall the sound of the console spinning the disc. I recall what it smelled like, ffs. It changed me. Only a bit later would come *THE* game that gave me that same feeling multiplied about 100x: Metal Gear Solid. That *was* a movie! You were the hero in an action movie better than most actual movies. You WERE Solid Snake. It looks so primitive now and I'll be the first to admit that PS1 & N64 visuals did not age well but at the time they were absolutely amazing. I swear the jitters and such were noticed but only subconsciously as it didn't hurt the experience. It was just how the PS1 looked. It was amazing. We went from 16bit sprites to 3D models walking in 3D spaces. The leap was massive and I took that leap in about 60 seconds on a random weeknight. If too young to have been around, you simply have no idea. It was equal to what you're now seeing with VR but even more-so. PS1 remains my favorite console because of those experiences. I rarely play it but nothing has surpassed it.

[@TheEgg185]

I took a piss then went back to bed this morning.

[@billboyd1317]

DannyWilliamH one day I was riding my bicycle in the 80's and my buddy hands me his Walkman and says you gotta hear this, he had gotten hold of a super early Metallica demo.. the rest is history, shame that to me after cliff died so did Metallica..

[@DannyWilliamH]

@@billboyd1317 Fk yeah, man.

[@tabutog]

I live in a poor country and im from a poor family, i have to rent to play games in PS1 by hourly rate, my first game was resident evil 3 nemesis gave me heart attack and i fell in love woth jill valentine, the story, the gameplay, the game i hate the most silen hill not because its ugly but i just cant handle the fear playing the game so i just told to my self useless game lots of fog cant see a thing, the but yeah i feel what you said there the feeling that you are in control as if you are inside the game as if you are watching a movie, i feel the development of every character and every story and when you finish the games you have this feeling that is hard to explain, those are what i really missed on the games of the old console games, Sorry for my english

[@rars0n]

Yes. I was born in 1982, so as a kid I had a pong machine, then the 2600, later a 7800, and eventually an NES. We later had an SNES that my grandma bought for Christmas. The SNES was a mind-blower. However, the PSX was more of a mind-blower. I didn't want to admit it at the time because I was really interested in the N64 which eventually got delayed a year, but I remember seeing the first commercials for Ridge Racer and how amazing it looked. Sony also nailed the ads by hiding cheat codes in them, both in video and print ads. That was the coolest shit ever. They heavily targeted the 18+ crowd, not with lewd ads or anything, but just by making the damn thing seem so cool; at that time video games were largely seen by the general public to be a kid's thing. This made the Playstation seem like a thing you had to have. The 3D graphics of the Playstation showed that actual 3D gameplay in the home was really possible. The Saturn had launched first, but its ports of arcade games like Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter were really disappointing. The Playstation made it look like Sega didn't know what they were doing. The Playstation completely shook up the gaming industry. Before then, there was a great rivalry going on between the SNES and Genesis, and both were great game consoles, but the Playstation was a hell of an entrance by Sony, and a clear signal that neither Nintendo nor Sega was infallible. Never before or since has a company entered the gaming market so ferociously and dominated so thoroughly right off the bat. What a time for gaming that was!

[@theblubus]

I know why Sony left out those features... [Sony Exec approaches microphone] "299" [Sony Exec exits stage]

[@r.u.s.e3586]

Yea they were *really* betting on that price tag.

[@opedromagico]

4:40 - aaaaa those tigers! I was around 7 years old, this game was in a demo cd.. I had such an enormous fear of the tigers that I couldn't do anything xD

[@wolfpackflt670]

That butler was way more scary. No music and you can hear him coming from the sounds of the dishes clacking on the plate he's carrying. It's comparable to Mr. X in RE2.

[@NGRevenant]

@@wolfpackflt670 yeah he was spooky, we used to trap him in the walk in fridge

[@benwyatt7619]

@@wolfpackflt670 I used to be terrified of the ‘man with the cup of tea’ and had no idea there was an entire game beyond the lake and two tigers at the beginning of the Great Wall lol.

[@juniorgod321]

When I saw Tekken for the first time, I thought to myself "this is like real life graphics"!

[@will5948]

I remember distinctly saying to a friend after Ocarina of Time coming out that this was it, graphics will stop here, this is basically the real world.

[@FredM8Beats]

Tekken 3 was the best childhood memories

[@amilamad]

It real life if you are a character inside tekken ;)

[@tmacmc2984]

It was Toshinden for me. When I saw the girl fighter, the one with the transparencies, doing cartwheels around the screen I said to my mate "it's like little people inside the TV". I'd been anticipating the new home 3D game machines since I'd had my head blown off in 92 in the Arcade with Virtua Racing. As soon as I got my hands on an import PS1 in late 94 I knew that was it. Games for life Yo!

[@therunawaykid6523]

juniorgod321 I’ll never forget forget the first time I played crash warped before it was released on the ps1 in my uncles electronics shop I was amazed by the coco’s tiger levels 😧

[@srhalnon]

4:05 - Mip mapping doesnt make things blurry.(as long as your displaying the right mip level at the right distance). Mip mapping in fact makes it so that surfaces farther away look clearer. It comes down to making the size of the texture match more closely with the actual number of pixels used to display that texture on the screen. Like if you have a 512x512 texture. But your texturing a plane that is far away from the camera, than the plane will be taking up far fewer pixels. Lets say 50x50. If you use the originla 512x512 texture, it may appear MORE blocky and not look like anything at all. Thats because youre actually losing a ton of color info. on that 50x50 grid, 2 adjacent pixels are actually from 2 pixels that are really far away from each other on the texture. So none in between pixels from the texture get represented on screen. However, when you mip-map, you're downscalling, but your also bluring. So than lets say you generate a small mip-map of like 64x64. Now each on of those pixels in the mip texture is the average of an 8x8 block of pixels in the original texture. So now if you use that 64x64 mip map to texture than small plane, 2 adjacent pixels on the small 50x50 plane represent larger regions of the original texture, and far less color detail would end up being lost. Source: im a gpu software engineer.

[@jawn892]

I agree. I think the n64 looked blurrier because it used interpolation over very small textures because its texture cache was so small.

[@jawn892]

@Nicky Poundtown no, antialiasing is sub-pixel rendering--it'd make things less blocky using nearest neighbour interpolation, but not "blurry"

[@srhalnon]

@@jawn892 What your talking about is filtering. Linear vs nearest.When your rendering a textured plane, each vertex will have a texture coordinate associated with it. These texture coordinates tell the gpu which region of the texture to overlay on the plane. The texture coorinates are interpolated accross the surface as the frame is rendered. The interpolated coordinate may not fall directly on the center of a pixel on the texture. How you handle this situation is what filtering is. Nearest filtering finds whichever pixel in the texture that the texture coordinate is inside and uses only that color. Linear filtering will average pixel colors together with neighboring pixels, probably proportionally to how off center the texture coordinate is. This creates a smoother image because you are losing less detail. For low resolution textures displayed on a large surface, this can make things appear blurry.

[@jawn892]

@@srhalnon yes... but I don;'t disagree,. Indeed I said that it was linear filtering that was making the n64 blurry because it was extrapolating over a larger area because its texture cache was small. In a separate reply I was saying that anti-aliasing is not the same as linear filtering...

[@GiuseppeGaetanoSabatelli]

I remember when RAGE came out, it was a massive achievement in texture streaming and "4K textures." It had beautiful backgrounds. The issue I ran into with RAGE, though, was that they didn't spend enough time on some of the uh... closer textures. Looking at a small plant on the ground and having it be a blurry mess of a few pixels. xd

[@777Eliyahu]

For all the negative treatment that the N64 gets for its limited architecture, its insightful to see that the PSX also had a lot of issues. I like to think the Dreamcast was the first platform to really get it right on the 3D front.

[@stevensavoie856]

Lol, no it wasn't :) the dreamcast was a rushed product in my opinion. As I recall it, Sony had been marketing it's upcoming PS2, then dreamcast dropped to get ahead of the launch of the ps2, but I always felt that it jumped the gun. Sony 'stole' nearly the entire gaming market from sega and Nintendo. Sega appeared to have been secretly developing a sony killer console, but then news hit that Sony was cooking up their own ps1 killer, the ps2. Not wanting to be outdone yet again, the dreamcast launched. About a year or so of further development and the ps2 (which many held off buying a dreamcast for) launched. I wonder if it would have made any difference at all if they would have developed the console further before releasing the dreamcast, since ps2 was still the better buy with its built in fan base and backwards compatibility with the promise of improving the graphics of ps1 games.. maybe rushing to market was the right move after all. They at least sold some units. But it was far from 'dreamcast figured it out first'. They just pushed their console out earlier, and the home pc had already solved these things long before the dreamcast was an idea.

[@777Eliyahu]

@@stevensavoie856 everything you just said has absolutely nothing to do with the design of the console, but everything to do with marketability. By this time Sega had burned through its good will both retailers and consumers after the triple failure of the sega cd, 32x, and saturn. By contrast, sony edged out the market with its superior branding (mainstream name recognition) and home appliance pack in via the DVD player. The point of my comment is the superiority of DCs design compared to the early 3D consoles. It could push lots of polygons at a wide draw distance (like the N64) and implement detailed textures (like the PSX). Plus, windows CE and power VR made it easy to program for.

[@chfgn]

I generally consider the N64 to be the first system with decent 3D rendering, but I get what you’re going for with Dreamcast as it can do everything N64 does without the limitations you get from low-storage carts and tiny texture memory, which goes a long way toward producing a picture free of obvious technical compromises.

[@777Eliyahu]

@@chfgn I agree to the extent that the N64 could create actual 3D worlds, whereas the PSX used 3D as more a visual enhancement when dealing with larger enviroments, if that makes sense. I would be interested in seeing if a homebrew coder could make Ocarina of Time run on the hardware. I do think that for the N64 to use textures in a way that you really need larger media for would probably have made it prohitively expensive to manufacture. Aside from the moving parts, CDs need RAM and lots of it. The best designed N64 games used to cartridge format like a streaming device to send lots of data in and of the working memory at a more rapid pace than optical media would have allowed at the time.

[@stevensavoie856]

@@777Eliyahu wrong about what I said, but right about what you said. I get it, I wrote one of my typical long winded comments. I'm not in the least bit surprised if people don't read it all. I wouldn't. Liked your reply for the part you got right. I couldn't keep up with sega's desperate products. I got the sega cd module for my genesis, and that was it.

[@AB-kx4ty]

This was the era when generational shifts were possible for consoles. The PS1 was mind blowing based on what went before as was the PS2. These days, amazing graphics are a given and so it's the law of diminishing returns for cinsole makers. Much harder for developers to impress people these days.

[@andrewsprojectsinnovations6352]

Agreed. Isn't it sad that alongside generations blurring together (What have we gotten since 7th gen? HD output? High Dynamic Range?) the consoles themselves have largely lost their unique identities? Different sound synthesizers, resolutions, capabilities... There was no mistaking an NES game for a C64 one, SNES was clearly distinct from Genesis and Amiga, you had tangible reasons to choose N64, Playstation, or Saturn. And what ever happened to the console mascots?

[@KasumiRINA]

The PS1 having 3D meant possibilities to have a real three-dimensional gameplay, to change camera in cutscenes, and they could playback audio and video from CD, or just have games with bigger size, and saving on memory card, it all allowed for bigger, more complex games than what was there with 2D cartridge systems and password saving. Graphically, PS2 hit the peak of diminishing returns, but gameplay-wise PS1 was already nearing the possibilities, not the design though, as you can see with FPS shooters of the era being janky and not using the dual stick controls until very end.

[@1337w334b00]

@@andrewsprojectsinnovations6352 What happened to console mascots is that the main demographic the industry targets shifted from young children to teenagers with unsupervised credit card access lol

[@fredriksvard2603]

I loved NFS on PS1, that lambo top speed. And then NFS hot pursuit and the Porsche game.

[@bradojacko8247]

You have to focus on gameplay and then good writing and voice acting. If big developers cared about this, it would be easy to make good games rather than follow ESG scoring regimes and chase the best graphics or virtual reality, which will be the next great push.

[@ricklucas6216]

I was about 12 or 13 and saved up all my pennies and walked into Funco land to buy a Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995. The employee looked and me and said "Why don't you save up your money for something you really want, like a PlayStation". $300 seemed like so much money I would never be able to get it but he made me think that it could be a reality. I was able to save up enough and bough it maybe around October 1995. All I had was the pack in demo disc which was amazing. I can't even hook it up to any of our TV since they only had RF. I had to connect it to a VCR and then our TV. I was extremely excited about Wipeout and Twisted Metal coming soon. It was an amazing time. Then later, FFVII changed everything again.

[@anss321]

You got duped. Just imagine what that Virtual Boy would have netted you on eBay today.

[@thatJimwiththenes]

Yeah but he got to grow up playing good games.

[@anss321]

@@thatJimwiththenes Sure, a Virtual Boy might had a small sad headache inducing library of games, but it doesn't have to be turned upside down to work. So there!

[@federicodagostino6437]

​@@anss321 my playstation is from 1998 and works like the first day it got powered on. It also has a modchip. it doesn't need to be turned upside down.

[@anss321]

@@federicodagostino6437 That's not surprising. By 1998 they had fixed the problem.

[@RaspySquares]

who else spent hours playing those demo discs...

[@36SOAD817HMC]

hahahaha yeah i remember thouse days

[@nonfiction4126]

Those were some of the best.

[@SteveGameSDG]

I know I did.

[@salemsailsail2868]

Me, played interactive demo disc vol 10

[@timvandeneng4724]

Yeahhh mann. I used to play a lot of demos all stuffed up in one disc. God those discs were a serious nostalgic vibe

[@sebastianelytron8450]

Still remember my joy when my parents bought me a PS1, it was literally the greatest thing on the planet when it first came out.

[@timgo2345]

Your image is from a game I played when I was 6-7 years old! After many years of searching it last year I finally found it (Little Big Adventure)

[@ReinaldoGonzalezreix2x]

I remember when I get my "polystation" it was a Chinese Nintendo NES clone.. Jaja that was a bummer but in the end it was fun too jaja

[@jtjones4727]

I remember that time also. Except I went with the N64 instead. Which don't get me wrong, at the time I was amazed the first time I played Mario 64, it was a revolution. But I remember also thinking, dang, the PS uses CDROM, that's some high tech $hit there, I wish I had one of those also. But then when the PS2 came out, I jumped on board right away. Of course I jumped on Gamecube also when it came out. Finally, I thought, Nintendo is embracing modern hardware. Wow, how times have changed.

[@Ralph_Sandwich]

My brother in law brought his PS1 over to our house when he was just dating my sister in 94 with Street fighter alpha and destruction derby. My and my little brother were absolutely blown away by every aspect of the system from the start up sound to the insane graphics and sounds. We had the the SNES and NES in our room and when my sister kicked us out of her room and we had to go back to playing the SNES it just wasn't the same anymore. We immediately conjured up a plan to mow lawns, wash cars and do what ever else we could for money that year to buy our own PlayStation. Good times.

[@muaries12]

Playing soccer games in ps1 was a godlike feeling back in 98' I never owned nothing better that a clone snes but pulling allnighters at friends houses was great

This video gave me such a nostalgia! I’m suddenly in my summer house, my father is still alive, the rain is pouring outside and I’m playing a new game that I just got from the game shop. I wish I could go back in time...

[@nabilyar]

That's so sweet. Great memory. Such a good memory.

[@HuGiv5]

God bless man 🙏

[@voidofhope6259]

As do I friend. Hope you are having a good day today

[@retrogamer64007]

We all wanna go back in time.

[@David-zs1xk]

I feel you man...

[@reallybigmistake]

0:20 A lot of people don't know this but Sony released an arcade board based on the PS1 called the ZN-1, the difference from the PS1 was that the ZN-1 used a ROM board to play the game instead of a cd drive/cd rom and it had 2MB of VRAM instead of the 1MB on the PS1. Sony never made any arcade games, they licensed the ZN-1 to companies like Capcom, Namco and others. The Namco System 11 which plays Tekken, Soul Edge and other games is a licensed Sony ZN-1!!!

[@rjsmith2007]

That's a brilliant move.

[@maxxdahl6062]

That was capcom's revision of it. Sony's was the System 11. ZN-1 had a custom capcom made audio set up, where as System 11 used the default PS1 audio hardware, that's why emulation was pretty much silent for ZN-1 games in the beginning where as it was there from the beginning with System 11 emulation. It was capcom proprietary.

[@sharkinahat]

No Z-buffer? Dang, I'm amazed we got any 3D on PS1.

[@zummone]

And yet the system was fast enough that it could bruteforce 3D through simple painter's algorithms and even add geometry subdivision on top of that.

[@DanielMonteiroNit]

Consider this: many early 3D games for the PC didnt rely on Z-buffering. that's one of the main reasons it would require a Carmack on your team to ship a game.

[@DanielMonteiroNit]

@If you laugh you sub! on par with Quake, I would say. If you take something like Descent (1993), then it was actually behind the curve

[@Atlas_Redux]

I seem to recall MDK not having z-buffer or mipmaping on PC either, basing itself on MMX instead of GPU for rendering. Might be extremely wrong though. Been out of the loop for quite some while.

[@jtsiomb]

Pretty much no 90s game on any platform whatsoever used a z-buffer. It's very expensive unless implemented in hardware. You can do 3D graphics without a z-buffer.

[@SumeaBizarro]

I like how indie horror game inspired by silent hill especially in PS1 style retro presentation, low poly 3D graphics, it emulates the wobbliness of 3D increasingly stronger whenever the game has a paranormal moment among other types of effects and it enhances some moments in fun manner when the effect is simulated and strengthened.

[@botez5671]

Haha you said among

[@drpleaserespect]

@@botez5671 🗿

[@sssj806]

​@@botez5671 did you want him to use amongst?

[@criznittle968]

I love when a KZbinr knows their shit, and MVG is at the top of his game.

[@EastyyBlogspot]

I remember John Carmack was not a fan of the warping, Doom for the saturn apprently had a version of Doom running with High frame rate ....but texture warping and John got the developers to change it....to the port we got (which was not good)

[@CrowCZ]

Which is pretty funny considering how bad warping was in original Quake 2 (or Q2 based games like Kingpin).

[@DaveVoyles]

Yes, my understanding is that John refused to have ports of DOOM use graphics hardware, and instead relied on the CPU to do all rendering, which was the point of contention for many of the folks doing the ports.

[@Jerry4050]

In the end he left Id software since he ask too much for his games. Rage was a complete flop since he wants mega textures.

[@leoleonvids]

It's impossible for the Saturn to get texture warping as it only uses quad polygons (or more specifically, deformed sprites.) The reason as to why the PS1 gets texture warping is because it uses tris and thus the texture is deformed without taking perspective into account due to the lack of a z-buffer. However, it'd be impossible deform the texture in such a way when you have four sided polygons. If memory serves, the reason as to why Saturn Doom ended up that way was because they went from using both the SH-1 and SH-2 to just the SH-1 for 3d rendering and back and forth. I can't remember correctly however, and it retrospective it might not make much sense....

[@Atlas_Redux]

@RW3ints John is a hack?! The man is a literal genius of coding and maths in general. Saying Carmack is a hack is literally some of the dumbest I've ever read. Any amazing mind can make mistakes. Einstein's stubbornness held him back a lot in the later years.

[@DjNikGnashers]

The first time I played 'destruction derby' I thought it was amazing. 20 cars all with their own real-time damage. Now I see old clips, and it looks like somebody smashing a lego set up.

[@jackwgn]

That's what I thought about twisted metal. When the cars get damaged and then explode. Looked incredible at that time, distracted from the screams that all sounded the same when you died.

[@swine13]

I used to sit and daydream about what my life would be like if I had that game... :( Then again, nowadays I could buy something like wreckfest but I dont...

[@jikkme]

@@swine13 Wreckfest is fun. You should give it a shot.

[@user-no7mz1pb2f]

@@swine13 i agree with paul. Wreckfest is really fun and basically a modern version of destruction derby

[@CoalCoalJames]

One of the first games I got, good times~

[@sstephiL]

The most realistic game for me, back when I was a kid and when I got my hands on PS1, were Driver 2. Im into cars from very little steps, and I always wanted to get some game where I can crash cars and see them actually damaged. I had that one disc without any name on it, but it was PS1 game that came with the console. Few minutes later, I was crashing all over the place in Havana. I remember my dad bringing out the Gran Turismo 2 out of the birthday present box, I was blown away. I couldnt get out of the room because of it. What a genius time for consoles and games that was.

[@undefBehav]

One of the exceptions I believe was the Doom port for PS1. Because of the unique way the Doom engine tackles the hidden surface removal problem and the texture mapping on surfaces, it supported perspective-correct textures out-of-the-box.

[@Kenjuudo]

It hasn't to do with hidden surface removal. The doom engine is rather a ray caster. For each column of pixels on the screen it sends a ray in the corresponding angle from the player position and once it hits a wall it draws a pixel column with the height based on the distance the ray travelled. It's something completely different from drawing triangles.

[@undefBehav]

​@@Kenjuudo The rendering technique used in the Doom engine is not a raycaster even remotely. By the term "hidden surface removal", I actually meant the approach the engine takes for space partitioning (namely, binary space partitioning) to determine the order in which the level geometries are going to be drawn on the screen, effectively removing any surfaces/walls hidden or occluded away by geometries that are closer to the camera. From there, the engine just projects the world-space coordinates of those level geometries to screen-space, and performs a linear interpolation of texture coordinates between them, resulting in a perspective-correct mapping of textures.

[@c0d3_m0nk3y]

You can't look up and down in Doom. That means, wall polygons can be rasterized vertically and floor polygons can be rasterized horizontally with simple linear interpolation without a perspective division.

[@Kenjuudo]

@@undefBehav It's a raycaster. I know because I made one.

[@undefBehav]

@@Kenjuudo So did I, and it is not-but Wolfenstein3D is. It was though, in its early stages, an enhanced version of the Wolf3D engine, but at some point they had to replace it with a BSP-based renderer after realizing certain level geometries slowed the engine down almost to a halt.

[@Fuzy2K]

The Genesis had "Blast Processing" The PlayStation had "PiñataVision"

[@dowskivisionmagicaloracle8593]

Blast Processing .... like spending a day on the can after mexican food.

[@knuckles1206]

The NES has "Playable Power" The N64 has "64 Bit Architecture" And the Dreamcast has "'A Mind"

[@oktayyildirim2911]

Woah, Fuzy? From the CStreams?!

[@Fuzy2K]

@@oktayyildirim2911 Yes indeedy :P

[@elijahkoufos4638]

Genesis does what Nintendont

[@robwyatt]

The warping, affine mapping, or lack of perspective correction is really nothing to do with the lack of a depth buffer and more to do with the fact it requires a divide at every pixel. Yes, to do perspective correction you do need to at least compute the depth value, specifically 1/depth, but you don't have to put it in a buffer. This was the mid 90's and hiding the cycle latency of a divide at the pixel level would have been tricky, aka impossible, don't forget at this point in time 3dfx wouldn't be out for another couple years. Think how simple the raster engine was, with no filtering or no mip-mapping, affine texture mapping is literally 2 integer adds per pixel, technically they are fixed point adds but they are still integers. In addition the values you add are constant for the scanline and they can be done in parallel so the visible cost is an integer add and a memory access for the texture and a final output write - it was pipelined but trivially like an old CPU. Yes it has to do a little bit of extra work at the edges of a triangle to compute gradients etc but the main pixel operations while trivial were not free, in fact, the pixel engine would go twice as fast if you didn't texture map because it didn't have to do any of this (Naughty Dog were the best at taking advantage of this, Crash is flat shaded because his polygons were so small they weren't worth texture mapping, may as well flat shade them and get 2x performance). To add a divider to this trivial pixel logic would have been insane, it would have crippled the performance, would have made the chip huge. Even with the GTE dealing only in integers if you divide them you end up with a fraction. This divide doesn't need to be floating-point, not even close, but the result does need enough fraction bits to be useful. Even with the PS1 GTE integer resolution you'd probably be looking at a 32bit divide which is a sucky operation, it takes a lot of silicon or its inherently slow, the faster you make the operation the bigger it gets in silicon area and you rapidly get into diminishing returns. Even today on a modern CPU an integer add probably only takes 1 cycle whereas an integer divide might take 8 or 10 or more - its a difficult operation to do in silicon. Modern GPUs hide the divide (and every other operation) by massive pipelining which had barely been invented at the time of the PS1. Later GPUs in the generation, like the N64, did use what we would call a modern pipeline. The N64 was derived from silicon graphics which had a history of graphics hardware (Nvidia and 3dfx both came out of SGI). To be honest, omitting the depth buffer is more of a mystery but they do get complicated quickly and they carry a lot of state. On the surface they are simple but you need comparison modes, you need to read and write it at every pixel so bandwidth is higher, you probably need alpha test so you can do polygons that only fill the depth buffer on non-transparent pixels, you need to be able to turn it off particularly for rendering anything blended - it all adds complexity. In addition, the GTE didn't generate usable depth values so it would need to be more powerful. Without perspective correction, a depth buffer can have some weird artifacts, two intersecting polygons will intersect in a curve and if the polygons are large it can be very visible, and as it moves, very distracting. Its the same error as the texture warping just manifested in a different way. The PS1's graphics were terrible and they could have only existed in the window when the PS1 was released. Any earlier it wouldn't have been possible at all in a consumer device and even a year later it would have been a totally different device with perspective correction and depth buffers.

[@ModernVintageGamer]

Great post Rob 👍

[@reanimationxp]

Thanks for the insight! I find this subject fascinating and often wondered "why would they release the console with those glaringly obvious problems", but then I realize that Atari released a console with terrible resolution capabilities despite better options being available. The 3DS is a fairly recent portable console and has blocky, shitty, non-antialiased graphics for most games. Sometimes it makes sense to be first to market, be cheaper, or have an easier development pipeline and there's always capability vs cost decisions that have to be made. Most end users aren't me and are there for the game, not the graphics tech, and won't care or maybe even notice the things I do.

[@lopwidth7343]

Very interesting(and hard to understand) What did you do if one can ask? That insight must mean you worked closely with ps1 or similar hardware at the time

[@robwyatt]

@@lopwidth7343 I have worked on a lot of console hardware and software. I didn't work on the PS1 hardware but did write lots of really high perf software for it (all asm). I was the system architect of the orginal Xbox, I worked on the graphics system for the PS3, I was a founding member of the Sony ICE team. On the software side, I did the PS2 engine for Ratchet and Clank at Insomniac, I did their PS3 engine too for Ratchet and Resistance. I pretty much left the games industry at this point, consoles these days are boring because they are just PCs - its very ironic me saying that because we did it first with the Xbox. The stuff Dimitri covers in these videos is the golden age of video games. I was the system architect of the MagicLeap hardware, well the graphics side but also the base processor. I had nothing to do with the optics or the industrial design. AR gives me a headache but it was a good thing to work out, a completely different way of looking at graphics. Today I do a lot of work with custom cameras, custom image processing, AI, machine vision. Some of it uses GPUs, some of it uses embedded hardware, some of it is FPGA completely custom. I should write a blog, I have some great stories.

[@lopwidth7343]

@@robwyatt Thanks for the detailed reply. Im nowhere near a level to understand exactly what you say(i gave up on first level of asm study course) but interesting anyway. Back in mid-late 2000 i could listen to john carmack speak and only actually understand 5% maybe. The resistance engine felt heavily in line with the way id software and valve did engines. Was that on purpose or just a coincidence of the time? Felt like a vsynced quake engine of sorts, as if you designed it with same principles. Or is that just missing the point completely and nothing much to do with designing the subsystems and data handling, or what goes into writing a game engine?

[@izzieb]

Video about Saturn using quads? Would be a good follow on from the recent videos.

[@georgeschannel9411]

Yes! Please do a Saturn video. Also, would love an analysis bon why the Saturn loads games a lot faster.

[@daviddyer3543]

@@georgeschannel9411 Same here. Also, talk about how Traveller's Tales had to make some custom rendering code for Sonic R to get some convincing textures and get around the disadvantages of the VDP1/VDP2 setup on the Saturn.

[@Liam3072]

@@jiijijjijiijiij Regarding the way the Saturn handles transparency, there's a super-insightful video on YT from a chinese guy (I think) explaining in details how the VDP1 and VDP2 work and what are their limits regarding transparency. It's extremely detailed yet pretty easy to understand and covers pretty much everything one needs to know about this on the Saturn.

[@noop9k]

VGEDRR Saturn has several implementations of transparency at once and each imposes limitations that easily become a deal-breaker.

[@noop9k]

Actually, both 3DO and Saturn render quads in a similar way and with similar flaws.

[@Nostalgia_Realm]

Interesting! I've noticed that CPU renderers for PCs in general also has always had the same warping issues. So it seems to lack a z-buffer. I wonder if it would it otherwise be too complex to render for the CPU? I don't know if Microsoft's WARP renderer has this same issue. But I've seen it in older games like Toy Story (2?) that include a software renderer.

[@alexandernorman5337]

Yes, it is the result of not having a Z-buffer. Triangle vertices have X, Y, and Z coordinates. And the texture coordinates within them also have X, Y, and Z coordinates. But the Playstation's 3D renderer has no ability to work with Z. And the Geometry Transfer Engine didn't have the extra MAC for it either. The Playstation was built for speed. For it's time it could produce a very high polygon count. And they took some significant shortcuts in the precision of the math units and their number in order to get that speed.

[@mleise8292]

I've written a software rasterizer for a Pocket PC years ago just for fun. The warping of textures especially close to the camera is not an artifact of a missing Z-buffer, but was necessary sacrifice for performance, because the required divisions for perspective correction were very costly. Essentially the rasterizer treated 3D triangles as 2D ones with only X and Y coordinates plus texture coordinates _linearly_ interpolated between the vertices. That means, textures could be rotated, scaled and skewed within a triangle, but never have a sense of perspective where the texture scale shrinks with distance. Now think of your typical video game wall made up of 2 triangles. Triangle A has the vertical edge close to the camera (and one vertex at the far end) and triangle B has the vertical edge at the far end (and one vertex close to the camera). Triangle A's vertical edge will be large on screen and cause a large vertical texture scale while looking skewed towards the vanishing point in the distance. Triangle B will see a small vertical texture scale and skew in the opposite direction. This is what causes the apparent kink or warping in the image. Take a look at images for "affine texture mapping" to get the idea. To add perspective correction, the rasterizer needs to also know the Z coordinate of each vertex and change the texture scale based on depth. The code for that ends up with a division operation for each pixel, IIRC, and that made it unbearably slow. The cheaper hack was to just divide the triangles with the most apparent warping into smaller ones. Obviously you cannot escape the division necessary for projecting a 3D vertex onto a 2D screen, but now you only have to perform a couple for the new vertices instead of one each pixel. For example the windows in the Lara Croft PS1 footage at 3:14 appear to be subdivided into 8 quads, each with it's own little warping. At 3:18 you can see the game engine refining the sub-division for the crates on the right.

[@MrMarinus18]

I is important to keep in mind that in 2D games a Z-buffer does nothing but is still sending values that go unused. At the time 2D games were still very common so including a Z-buffer increases cost and actually decreases performance in many games.

[@NLind]

I noticed that in the original Descent, if you set the graphics to Lowest you get the warping textures.

[@segaunited3855]

@@alexandernorman5337 PS1 maxed out at just under 100k Rendered Polygons.

[@Dosmod]

I used to tell everyone that the walls were alive in all playstation games back then, and they all either laughed at or ignored me. And then 20something years later I finally find this video! HA

[@luism8612]

Dosmod 2020!!!!

[@Waccoon]

Z-buffering requires a lot of extra memory and taxes the cache, so it makes sense to leave it out. I believe MIP mapping is actually done in software, but APIs typically do the hard work of setting up the hardware so it kind of "feels" like hardware does that stuff. I've seen plenty of late-stage PS1 games that have really fast MIP mapping, and I believe GameHut (aka Traveler's Tales) made a video about how they did more advanced texture mapping on the PS1 and Saturn. Based on the original presentation papers, the Commodore Hombre chipset was supposed to support non-filtered integer texture mapping in hardware, and use the CPU with special instructions to do more complex texture rendering. Their architecture was more in line with the Atari Jaguar, but Hombre performance would have been comparable to the PS1 since it used a dynamic cache. The main reason I'm disappointed Hombre didn't get released is that it was designed from the ground up to use OpenGL. Back in the 90's when hardware was still being hard-coded and proprietary APIs were the norm, having a system built around an industry standard API would have been revolutionary. The PS1 was fast, but it still had to be "hard-coded" to get good results.

[@DrYak]

With "software" mip-mapping, the CPU orders the polygon to be displayed with either one or another mip-map level. The whole polygon 'jumps' suddenly between mipmap levels. On a tilted surface like a floor, the sudden jump will be very noticeable. With "hardware" mip-mapping, the GPU *itself* selects the mip-map level based on the Z coordinate while it is rendering. - At worst, it selects either one or another level *per pixel*. So there's a fixed distance where things start becoming more blurry. (A fixed constant band that is noticeable at a fixed camera distance while moving on a floor), but a polygon can be rendered with multiple mip-maps (though some hardware limit that to two levels). - At best, the GPU will do *trilinear filtering*, it will smoothly transition from one mip-map level to another and mix between them based on the exact Z coordinate. There are no "bands" visible on tilted surface, while simultaneously, there is no aliasing ("shimmering") of texture in the distance. But all this requires having a concept of perspective and having actual Z coordinate. Which is hard to achieve on hardware that only does affine transformation (saturn, ps1), i.e.: has no concept of perspective. It's not truely displaying 3D polygons, it's only stretching square sprites (saturn) or flat triangle (ps1) into weird distorted shapes on the flat screen.

[@jonathanr0824]

@@DrYak Man you guys are experts! I'm no programmer, just a video game fan. Thanks for the info! :)

[@prezidenttrump5171]

Waccoon spent 28 minutes googling.

[@catbutler5282]

​@@DrYak typically modern GPUs don't use the Z coordinates to determine mip-map selection, they use the difference in UV coordinates between neighbouring pixels. The larger the UV delta the lower the resolution of the mip-map selected. As such mip-map selection is also influence by rendering resolution, a higher resolution render of the same scene will sample more detailed mip-maps due to smaller UV deltas between pixels. The reason that trilinear filtering often makes textures appear excessively blurred at oblique angles is that it selects the mip-map level based on the UV delta on either axis of a 2x2 pixel sqaure, whichever is largest, and the square maps to an elongated area of texture. Anisotropic filtering solves this by taking multiple trilinear samples along this elongated area of texture before averaging them.

[@DrYak]

@@catbutler5282 Yes, I am aware of it, I was skipping details for simplicity. (And if you look at the maths, in the grand scheme of things "Z, resolution, blurry vs aliasing slider" boil down to roughly the same as "dU, dV and interpolation") - The "whichever is largest" part is actually configurable on other (slightly more modern) cards. It was always been configurable on 3Dfx family cards, making a balance between blurry or aliasing (shimmering). - Next to anisotropic filtering, yet _another different_ way to increase the details without increasing the aliasing was FSAA. On cards (like 3Dfx Voodoo 5) that rendered multiple full blown frames per frame to achieve the effects (edge antialiasing, motion blur, etc.) each final pixel on the screen ends up being rendered and thus sampled multiple time, but with slight offsets. By tweaking the aliasing balance, you make sure that each sampling is actually sampling different texels. You end up basically doing the same as anisotropic filtering (using 32 texels as input for the final screen output), but without any support for more than trilinear filtering in hardware (each rendered pixel only depends on 8 texels).

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

MVG. I thank you for answering this question that has sat in the back of my mind for 25 years. As a youngster, we argued over whose graphics were better, N64 or Playstation. I kept pointing at the warbliness as my argument for N64 and my friends refused to see it. Especially on comparable games like Vigilante 8. Thank you for validating this. I have learned one thing from this video. We argued about stupid things as kids.

[@DJ_Dopamine]

Now the kids argue about Tflops and don't understand what they are talking about either!

[@ThePeacePlant]

@@DJ_Dopamine lol, lots of adult nerds fighting about it. With myself, I'm still getting the PS5. I am not worried about the strongest. I want the most reliable and great game library

[@ThePeacePlant]

@Random Person I really need to get my hands on one. I have be debating it for too long, but I need to finally take that step forward

[@blackmetal4546]

@@ThePeacePlant I got a switch 3 months ago and I do not regret it.

[@inakibolinaga8078]

Being the most powerful doesn't mean anything if you dont have the best games!

[@kemi242]

I noticed this when I first played a PS1 game in an emulator. Since it looked smooth on real PS1 on a CRT display, I was always thinking this was an artifact of the emulation. Very good explanation.

[@Coolaidjammera]

Also something crazy is that people emulated this on scratch a coding program for children by using the same thing as the PlayStation used so maybe we could make ps1 games on scratch if your into that thing?

[@felixalonzo2847]

Perfect Dark reminds me of Mario 64 everytime I play it.

[@TheDeadAlewives]

XD I was thinking the same thing.

[@DjSaltyDog]

I read this comment before watching the video and was initially puzzled aha

[@wfjhDUI]

1:16 Resident Evil 2 looked that good on N64?! WAHT???

[@FoxUnitNell]

Yeah, they look like the dreamcast port. The 3d polygons in a fixed camera angle against 2d images must have been the 3d models were beasts of the era.

[@inakibolinaga8078]

@@FoxUnitNell That makes me dream of nintendo using discs instead of cartridges, it would been incredible

[@n00bfishie]

I don’t think it was that pronounced at the time, and the shots/scene compared here are not the same. But that said, the N64 was a much more powerful system - N64 had a 93Mhz CPU compared to only 33Mhz in the PlayStation, and it had a much more powerful GPU and hardware antialiasing, and much faster loading due to the cartridge format. It did not suffer from the pixel or texture wobbling either. But the N64’s cartridge media was also its achilles’ heel, since they were expensive, low-capacity, and nobody wanted to develop games for them. Thus, the PlayStation won out in the market, despite the N64 being more powerful.

[@leoleonvids]

That looks like it's probably using the Memory Pak or upscaled in an emulator. Definitely not 320x240.

[@crashoveride879]

@@leoleonvids iirc re2 ran at a high resolution on console

[@04dram04]

The PS1 warping drove me crazy, and I didnt understand why no one was talking about it back then

[@AB-ub9nd]

No one was talking about it because no one knew what 3D was supposed to look like. Also crt TVs provided a lot of natural AA.

[@segaunited3855]

Because on smaller CRTs the pixels and artifacts were easy to conceal. That's why PS1 has aged so poorly.

[@pb6198]

Because it was for cheaper than the Nintendo

[@swine13]

@@pb6198 I dont see what price has to do with whether or not people were talking about graphics jittering. Stop trying to bait people.

[@pb6198]

@@swine13 I'm not baiting people. If something is massively cheaper. Is it not expected that you'll find certain drawbacks 😐😐

[@Ghosthound_X]

It wasn't really about the graphics with PS1 it was more the style and the look of PS1 games that got me. And the TV commercials for the games were amazing. I specifically remember the tv commercials for Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII making a huge impression. Really I wasn't blown away by graphics until we got our first look at the Sega Dreamcast. Looking at Dreamcast graphics felt like looking at the future.

[@StarGazerTom1991]

That T-Rex never fails to stun me. I was just a little kid when the ps1 came out, grew up playing the Mega Drive. Music is still creepy as hell too!

[@Poki3]

4:09 - I don't remember Perfect Dark looking like this 🤔

[@sh0ryualfa393]

Secret level dude!

[@thecommenter578]

Mistakes were made

[@speedwolf]

4:00 Perfect Dark isn't quite how I remember it…

[@marzdd9228]

Mandela effect...

[@thewallduck2022]

Must be cartridge tilting

[@aidanbrumsickle]

I felt like the jitter and everything really added to the atmosphere of games like Tomb Raider. I almost wish I still had a CRT TV to play it on.

[@swayybaby9772]

They’re cheap nowadays you can get one for like 90$ or less

[@RobertNES816]

I remember getting my PS1 in 1997 and being absolutely amazed at the graphics. Also playing games on a CD was like wow! Coming from a SNES I quickly forgot about 16bit and fully embraced 32 bit lol.

[@retrogamer64007]

Funny how the SNES sprite graphics aged very well vs PlayStation and N64 3D lol

[@RobertNES816]

@@retrogamer64007 I mean the PS1 2D games actually look great. But yeah some 3D games look horrible today.

[@mediacc8372]

same

[@casedistorted]

4:10 “for these scenes in Perfect Dark” ..Sees Super Mario 64.. My Brain: Are we having a stroke yet?

[@ruediix]

Looks like they changed out the B-Roll there for some reason.

[@arciks11]

Odds are those features weren't included to make "299" price point a thing. Which did have an intended effect of practically outselling Saturn in west before it even shipped.

[@Edexote]

Those omitted features were just a way of achieving such high performance with simpler processors at a lower cost. As simple as that, compromises had to made. And I don't think anyone will disagree that the compromises were spot on.

[@victornpb]

Júlio Martins raw performance over visual fidelity was the right choice, or else the PS1 would just have been a slow n64.

[@michaelmitzel9755]

This is honestly one of my favorite videos you've made. I watch it every couple months it seems.

[@donkeyk1988]

Normally I’m not keen on emulation effects that look to “improve” the image but I do think PS1 is an exception. Reducing the warping and shimmering in my opinion makes ps1 game less jarring to play on modern HD screens and makes them easier to live with in 2020. But then I’m a big N64 fan, Vaseline textures and all, so take with a pinch of salt anything I say....

[@kenrickkahn]

I agree.. PS1 need the emulation filters..

[@AceStrife]

Increased resolution, increased framerate, widescreen aspect ratio support (without cropping), anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.. these are pretty much required to play old games for me as they vastly improve the core experience. Framerate probably being the most important; I can't accept a 30FPS game anymore especially on a 120Hz monitor (which made 60FPS look like how 30FPS used to look on a 60Hz display). If we find out other things that improve the hardware like this PS1 thing, then all the better. I'd emulate games over playing the originals any day. Now if only we got modern consoles emulated with these improvements, or PC ports which aren't hamstrung by dated-on-release modern console hardware. I guess "HD" remasters have to do until then..

[@Kalvinjj]

The best option to play PS1 games in my experience so far has been a PSP. The thing can just literally draw it on 1:1, there's something weird about how a 1:1 pixel draw feels better than a direct integer 2:1 or such, but it just does look good and work perfectly. Besides being a portable with sleep function makes it extremely convenient to just grab the console and play the games at any random moment and stop the same way.

[@54356776]

@@Kalvinjj Ps vita is even better. It's like the games are made for the system.

[@neoasura]

I think both PS1 and N64 look better when 3D hardware acceleration and resolution upscaling are used, it breathes new life back into games giving them a HD remake look.

[@MegaRayland]

Why were those things left out? Easy answer: “$299” It’s easy to say “but the N64 had them!”, sure. However it is important to remember that the PS1 came out in 1994 meaning that the architecture was finalized late 1993 with costs associated at the time. The N64 was extensively delayed a couple of years exactly as a result of the vision not working with the costs, ultimately resulting in a hardware better than PS1 in some areas and deficient in others.

[@reallybigmistake]

All Nintendo had to do was released the N64 with 8MB of ram instead of the 4MB that we got. Only a few games used the expansion slot to make games run/look better. damn shame Sony sold the PS1 at 299 and they still lost a lot of money until the PS1 started to sell like crazy and people bought a ton of games.

[@joesterling4299]

The N64 was also co-developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI), the darling of 3D computer rendering at the time. It shares much in common with an Indigo station, which was actually used to develop some games for the N64. The console truly was revolutionary then for a consumer product, despite its low-polygon count and small texture memory (resulting in blur).

[@rars0n]

The N64 was originally supposed to launch in 1995 along with the PSX and Saturn (which both launched in 1995 in NA). It didn't launch due to hardware bugs that had to be worked out. It's not a matter of the N64 hardware necessarily being newer and therefore better in some ways, but rather when the hardware was being designed, different sacrifices were made by the hardware design team that lead to certain things being emphasized over others. I'd argue that Sony made some great decisions and ultimately, probably made better decisions than the SGI guys since their hardware wasn't heavily delayed.

[@rars0n]

@@reallybigmistake "Sony sold the PS1 at 299 and they still lost a lot of money until the PS1 started to sell like crazy" Source please.

[@quantum.9883]

How much did a N64 cost at the time?

[@JustSomeDinosaurPerson]

As much as I love the PS1, good god I could not stand the weird wobble, warping and texture shifts. I would very much appreciate devs leading those unity shaders as OPTIONAL in their game. That way the people who want it are satisfied and everyone else who doesn't is satisfied.

[@Tanookicatoon]

The thing about these graphics, You didn't notice a lot of it on CRTs that blurred everything together. Especially when most monitors of the time were much smaller on average.

[@racerx8410712]

I see a lot of tech talk back and forth about the abilities of the PS1 vs the N64. I understand very little of it. However I was in my early 20's around the time when both systems debuted. In essence I bought the 64 first and then the PS1. I like the graphics of the 64 more but the PS1 had such a huge library of games that there was plenty to like. Having both systems was having the best of both worlds.

[@will5948]

I didn't really see anything played on a PlayStation until after I got a Nintendo 64, I'd seen screenshots in magazines but that was it. When I finally saw Tomb Raider on a PlayStation (after seeing it on PC) it looked disgusting, MGS didn't help either (having also seen that on the PC). I basically wrote the PlayStation off as a child and never understood it and didn't want one. I missed out on a lot of childhood.

[@penonton4260]

@@will5948 FFVII and pepsiman ~

[@will5948]

@@penonton4260 I didn't miss out on FF VII, it was ported to PC. I played it on that.

[@aa-tx7th]

"Sorry for my incompetence it's just part of my charm." Wish I was rich enough to say that and get away with it..

[@nthgth]

Turbo lag on old Saabs had the same kind of adoration

[@CoolDudeClem]

Same thing happens with a lot of early 3D PC games, if I used a software renderer I often got the weird wobbles very similar to a PS1.

[@ZackRToler]

I remember being amazed by 3d graphics when I was a kid. I was a Genesis and SNES kid from the start so most of my memories of early 3d games is kinda fuzzy. So when emulating these old games from my childhood and seeing the wobblyness I got curious and came here.

[@Sinn0100]

I was there for the very beginning. The first time my best friend and I threw on Ridge Racer it was euphoric, it was memorizing, it blew our fu****g minds. The Sega Saturn had the same effect as the PSX at the time as well. Virtua Fighter on a big screen TV while buggy just absolutely flattened the previous generation. The leap from 16-bit consoles to 32-bit was so profound it was difficult to understand what we were seeing. From that moment on the arcades seemed almost less than. Why go to an arcade when our PSX's and Saturn's can push games well beyond in terms of scope.

[@Astfgl]

More so than just cost, the cut corners in the PlayStation's 3D hardware design allowed it to be *fast*. I always say that the PS1 may not have produced the prettiest polygons, but it produced a heck of a lot of them and was super fast compared to everything else on the market. And that was exactly what was needed at the time; the PlayStation's flexible design, ease of programming and raw polygon pushing grunt allowed developers to experiment with all sorts of 3D game designs without imposing too many restrictions. That in turn allowed the market of 3D games to grow and mature at a rapid rate and was key in securing the PS1's long-term success.

[@obvfw]

Whoa, deja-vu. I could've sworn I saw a comment like this on a different MVG video...

[@Astfgl]

Olimar Jones I dunno, maybe I wrote something similar before on another video? The same subject does come up from time to time.

[@LuigiXHero]

Wasn't the PS1 known for not being easy to program for?

[@Astfgl]

@@LuigiXHero The PS1 was very easy to work with, especially when compared to its contemporaries like the Saturn or the Jaguar. It's with the PS2 and PS3 that Sony started including all sorts of esoteric hardware architectures that made the machines increasingly more difficult to program for.

[@DonVigaDeFierro]

Yeah, and considering that the average consumer at the time had access to 640x480 CRT TVs, the cut corners were nowhere as blatant, or even as noticeable. I tried to play Macross VFX-2 on an LCD TV and it looked terrible. Not only it had the wrong aspect ratio, it looked like a bowl of granola. Sony did an insane job with the PS1.

[@TurboPikachu]

Even as a little kid playing on a CRT, I could notice the warping and shimmering of the PS1 and I preferred the more refined N64 despite the blurriness and less-complex polygons. By the time I got my hands on the Nintendo DS, I was very disappointed to see it relying on nearest neighbor like the PS1 as opposed to the bilinear texture filtering the N64 used. But at least the DS didn't suffer from the affine texture mapping the PS1 and GBA did

[@joshbest24]

I originally thought that maybe the developers were pushing more polygons than the system could handle so it warped due to the polygons swapping around or something, but I remembered that games that used flat shaded polygons like the Tobal games did not warp like that so it must have been to do with the textures

[@calska140]

I think it's beautiful that indie developers, mostly, have embraced the wobbly ps1 graphical style and have used it to create some really stylish, sophisticated games. With exception of maybe the old Atari colored blocks style, I think there's value in all of the old graphical styles. I think we've come to a common understanding that true-to-life graphics are slick and nice but using a retro style can perhaps convey a certain tone or feeling absent from true-to-life graphics. Also old games required your imagination to bridge the gap between the graphical limitations and reality, creating a more personal, impactful interaction with the game. Resident Evil 1 scared the hell out of me when I was young it conveyed the right tone and just enough graphical fidelity to allow my brain to fill in the gaps.

[@Thornskade]

It requires nostalgia to work for the most part. The weird artifacts are just that, weird, to someone unfamiliar with them.

[@calska140]

@@Thornskade Not true. I did not witness the NES, SNES, or Genesis era of graphics but I have played modern games that mimic these styles and I do find the graphical style is usually chosen to create a specific experience that wouldn't be possible with a different set of graphics. Mostly to my personal enjoyment I might add. I have no nostalgia for these older styles and yet I probably enjoy them as much as someone with nostalgia does. Your nostalgia assertion is the opinion of someone quite young who hasn't had enough life experience to admire the past for what it is. I thought the same when I was a teen about 2d sprites. Now I revere good spritework as a high art whose heyday I missed. Also "weird" has negative connotations when you're young but positive connotations when you get older and "fitting in" becomes an outmoded concept. The world is so much more trite and derivative than it seems when you're young. Things touted as "weird" and "unique" are usually something older with a different color palette. Truly weird things are a commodity.

[@Thornskade]

@@calska140 So what I understand you're not nostalgic but you have a similar admiration for the past after learning about it, rather than objectively evaluating the graphics for what they are. I had a PS1 as a kid, I think PS1 games look like shit. As for pixelated games - which can look good-ish but it's disappointing when you think a 2D pixel game could have looked like Ori instead. I don't have any statistics of course but most people I know agree with me on this, as does the industry as pixel games or games that emulate the look of old-ass consoles are quite rare even among indie developers in the grand scheme of things. If you produce a pixel game, the gameplay better be damn good to offset that.

[@tanyifan4261]

@@calska140 I also didn't grow up with any of the 2D consoles and only gotten to know them through emulation. I fully understand the love for 2D games and pixel art, because those mediums have high potential and they are done very well in games from that era. However, I doubt anyone with no nostalgia would be into the genuinely outdated and bad stuff like sprite flickering, or the limited fps of the original star fox.

[@23GreyFox]

There are gamers that loves games and than the rest 90% that are made of casuals and graphic whores.

[@Autunite]

The PS1 graphics reminds me of running Half-Life and CS 1.6 on PC in software mode. Back in the day I dfidn't have a PC with a proper graphics card, so I had to let my CPU do all the rendering, hence the software rendering mode. The textures wobbled, looked blocky and walls were skewed if you panned the camera near them.

[@ibraheemxd3335]

You’re a true gamer

[@dealloc]

And then there were people that intentionally ran 1.6 in software mode in order to see through smokes. Fun times.

[@LuaanTi]

I'm pretty sure your memory deceives you; the quake engine (heavily modified for Half-Life) had perspective correct texture mapping with proper interpolation and used floating points even in software rendering. The PS1's 3D graphics were quite uniquely broken, it's ridiculous how popular it was anyway :)

[@hristaki99]

@@LuaanTi Yup, the Half-Life engine in software never had a problem with texture warping, it just didnt have filtering and some effects looked worse or were missing.

[@kalapoikedeviere7962]

Back in the day too valve made masterpieeces :^}

[@pgr3290]

PS1 hardware was not perfect, but it was the hero everyone needed right then. It focused on 3D rendering, it was simple to work with, had a good amount of memory, good texture memory for the time, CD drive, quality audio. But most importantly it was cheap for developers AND consumers to jump on board. Neither the N64 nor Saturn was anywhere close on all these critical points. PlayStation was the right hardware for every man, woman and child.

[@MrJPM1992]

literally the points ps5 is going for but everyone wants to shit on it because it has less terraflops lol

[@plawson8577]

johann marin PS5 is fairy terrible and weak. It’s basically a 2013 PC. There’s better, more powerful cheaper products coming from Sega and Nintendo in the Next Year.

[@plawson8577]

P GR No. PS1 had underpowered and sloppy architecture. It was just easier to program and had kits that were more primitive to use. But, it was fairly outdated already by 1996.

[@pauldavis5665]

@@plawson8577 It is the games that matter most, not the graphics. Sony has the best line-up of exclusive first party games, that is why the PS4 dominated this generation.

[@pgr3290]

@@plawson8577 Nonsense alert. PS5 has an 8 core desktop class CPU and a GPU at least as powerful as a 5700XT. Absolutely nothing close to this performance existed in the PC consumer space in 2013. 95 percent of the world's gaming computers right now are less powerful. If they don't have at least an RTX2070 Super or an RX 5700XT, they don't have as much raw GPU performance as PS5.

[@velvetbutterfly]

I played through/watched a lot of PSN masterpieces, the FF trilogy on the system, MGS, RE1-3, MegaMan, a few others. but I only remember the texture warping and wobbling even happening on Silent Hill, which just added to the unsettling psychological horror of the strange worlds the town switches between.

[@catbutler5282]

Great video. One thing I'd like to point out is that while PGXP enables perspective correct texturing, it doesn't currently support a z-buffer due to the ways in which developers were able to play with perspective to make the best of the available fixed-point accuracy (I have got a video demonstrating it, but the build was _really_ hacky). The PS1's solution to depth sorting is very different to a normal hardware z-buffer. A z-buffer is another screen image containing a depth value per pixel which the GPU tests each new pixel against before deciding if it should replace the existing one or should be hidden, this means the order of rendering opaque geometry isn't important. Many PS1 games used the Ordering Table structure that accelerated the sorting of primitives from back to front, so they could be drawn in the correct order as described in the video.

[@AcornElectron]

I was working part time in Comet when it launched in the UK. Had to have one!

[@UCHUJIN0]

You member TEMPO?, Got my Dreamcast there!

[@vladpiranha]

To anyone who wants to understand the benefits of mipmapping, I recommend watching a video of the skydiving sequences from Pilotwings for the SNES. The SNES's Mode 7 effects were cutting edge for their day, but still ill equipped to render distant textures with an appropriate amount of detail (or lack thereof).

[@carlosreyesf19]

3:08 WHAT'S THE NAME OF THAT GAME? I remember playing it at a friend's house many years ago, and I never knew the name. Is it one of the Tomb Raiders?

[@ripewatermelonlol]

Yes it’s one of the tomb raiders, I don’t know which one exactly but it’s probably 2 or 3

[@Treblaine]

4:08 "The Nintendo 64 has MIP mapping enabled for example in these scenes here in Perfect Dark" [Mario 64 swimming] Mario's been recruited by the Carington institute I see.

[@igorthelight]

That's Perfect Dark. Just censored a little bit :-)

[@segaunited3855]

Saturn has BIT Mapping!

[@jackmyowl]

This is why I subbed to you MVG. You cover such a wide array of topics I'd have no idea about these things... and it also helps that your comment section also has tips they also leave.

[@burtbackattack]

You're really great at explaining quite complicated stuff in such a simple way. I know nothing about game development but I always feel I come away from your videos with some new insight. Thank you.

[@dmoore0079]

As flawed as it might have been, it was a pretty substantial technology leap from the 16bit era (SNES/Genesis). True, there was the Atari Jaguar, the 3DO and the Sega Saturn before it, but neither of them could create the 3D gaming environment at the level the PS1 did.

[@TheIvantals1]

When i saw gt3 on ps2 at bestbuy on the first ever 720p tv it looked like real life it was like photorealistic graphics.

[@blackthorn8639]

It was Jaw-dropping Awesome

[@justinfitzpatrick013]

What? No. Metal Gear Solid 2 and Gran Turismo 3 had already come out, looking photo realistic. GTA3 looked jenky even at the time, but was forgivable because it was so huge

[@abstr4cted496]

​@@justinfitzpatrick013OP said gt3 which is gran turismo not GTA.

[@justinfitzpatrick013]

@@abstr4cted496 oops you’re right. In that case, I agree whole heartedly😅

[@sierrakobold6896]

I remember getting PS1 as a gift on Xmas '96, had asked for N64 but my dad wasn't able to find one like most that holiday, hadn't really heard or read much about PS1 around then being more so Nintendo oriented. But to me it was just as good playing Jet motto and my dad got Resident evil for us to play together I guess to kind of make up for not being able to get an N64 since in the 3rd grade at the time was def not allowed to play M rated games, it scared the shit out of me and couldn't ever play it alone the first year or 2 though lol

[@NiGHTS1980]

Even back in 95, I hated the warping wobbling for both Playstation and Saturn...

[@LordTechnopants]

I always found the games rough looking from when we got ours at launch. A friend commented on the F1 game later and how when you went into the tunnel at Monaco "the roof flew off". We had a lot of fun with the PS, but I don't have many memories I want to revisit. I did play the first Tomb Raider through Christmas and I had flu - my head was banging. Fantastic game, but so hard on the eye - the warping and break-up. I felt horrible, but I had to play on from under my duvet. Funny to think of with current events.

[@Timsturbs]

when i first saw it i thought its broken or smth

[@LordTechnopants]

@@Timsturbs I don't think I ever got over that initial feeling that the warping and break-up made everything look unpolished and the only (early) game I had in 95 that didn't have these issues (as far as I can remember) was DOOM?

[@Timsturbs]

@@LordTechnopants on PS? i don't know it was my friend's. later i bought it for a couple of bucks as a cd player for my shelf stereo and the only game i've played was driver2.

[@MrSapps]

Seeing Half Life on PC was what really made me hate it even more, it was so "solid" compare to psx

[@jebbroham1776]

The PS2 was my first console, but I did play the PS1 at a buddy's place a couple times before the second one launched. I really liked the first two Playstations, they were simple yet powerful for their time. Twisted Metal and Spyro are the specific games I remember loving most on those consoles.

[@cobywalker3922]

4:09 Perfect Dark sure has changed over the years lol. Excellent video explaining not only the PS1 but also the N64's graphical capabilities. The fact that it uses integers is now obvious after hearing the explanation. Great video as always.

[@Fractal_blip]

Im pretty sure everything uses integers in computing.

[@cobywalker3922]

@@Fractal_blip Using Integers for 3D math is not common, most frameworks and hardware use Floating Point Numbers or Double Floating Point Numbers. Integers have the "Snapping"issue as he described because they can't represent any decimal places.

[@Fractal_blip]

@@cobywalker3922 oooo shit so it is dope.

[@vinniecorleone62]

I have always wondered why the background & floor planes on Playstation games were warped like that, now I know! Thank you for this technical explanation my friend!

[@DamienAlexander]

Omg that T rex at 6:00 that gave me such a flashback to my childhood, I remember it also opened its mouth and there was another animal on that demo as well.

[@inverse_of_zero]

First time watching, very informative, subscribed to a fellow Aussie, thanks! I just purchased a HDMI modded PS1 so this video is timely. Happy retro gaming 🎮

[@blackmennewstyle]

What i actually miss the most from the PS1 is the sounds of CD drive when loading any sequence of a game... Thanks for the very informative reasons of why the graphics were and still remain indeed so special...

[@ValleyRC]

Almost made them seem alive in a way, the same with all optical media based consoles. Same with the old Amiga and Ataris in a way, clunking away autonomously.

[@carllavery4442]

All 3 of the main consoles of that generation had varying strengths and weaknesses, leading each to have a quite distinctive look. Whether it be the wobbling on PS1, lack of transparency on the Saturn and a reliance on balancing its 2D and 3D capabilities or the quite pathetic texture capabilities of the N64. Yet I love the look of all 3 and all the imaginative games we got back then to work around their strengths and limitations

[@MaxLebled]

I feel like there are a couple things you could have clarified regarding the vertex snap/jitter effect. The PS1's co-processor for graphics math had vector coordinates stored as 16-bit values. Translation was a different operation with 32-bit integers. So if you had multiple transform operations in a chain, each depending on the previous one, the errors were building up fairly quickly. Picture the entire world as a 3D grid. On modern floating-point hardware, the "resolution" of this grid is extremely precise at the mathematical center of the scene, and gets coarser and coarser the bigger the number is. (That is to say, the further away you are from the center.) Look up footage of Mario Odyssey falling for 10 hours and you'll see the same effect on the pause screen. This is essentially what's also happening in the PS1, except (unless I'm mistaken) its grid is constantly coarse throughout its 3D space. I don't know the exact number, maybe someone more knowledgeable would like to chime in? But it means a vertex also "snaps" in 3D space during the vector calculations, THEN it also snaps to the nearest camera-space pixel during rasterization. (Because there is no sub-pixel rasterization on the PS1.) My understanding is that this is also part of the reason a lot of PS1 games had short far-z clipping planes. It wasn't just about hiding distant polygons, but distributing the limited amount of precision across the scene. The "3D grid" of a scene that is 20 meters by 20 meters will be alright, a scene that's 200 by 200 meters would be far coarser.

[@catbutler5282]

Developers on PS1 often used perspective tricks to render different objects at different scales, thus making better use of the fixed-precision. In Crash Bandicoot for instance the dynamic objects in the scene are 4x the scale of the scene geometry itself, they're just also 4x as far away and it's only the lack of Z-buffer that means they draw correctly.

[@MichaelPohoreski]

Maxime Lebled - 3D animator The lack of floating point precision was only PART of the problem. The PS1 GPU did **affine** texture mapping -- for speed. Treating a triangle with a "constant Z". This was commonly called "texture swimming" because as the camera panned around a triangle that was parallel to the look direction (the worst case) -- it would jitter or look like it was being rendered under water-- hence "swimming". The PS2 "Graphics Synthesizer" GPU did **perspective correct** texture mapping. This requires an extra division by Z PER pixel. Better quality at the cost of speed. Classic time vs quality trade off. When I worked on Need For Speed for the PS1 I remember Brad and Laurent spending a lot of time finding the right balance of **dynamic tessellation** for triangles closer to the camera to minimize "textures swimming."

[@MaxLebled]

@@catbutler5282 that's awesome! Thanks for sharing

[@MaxLebled]

@@MichaelPohoreski thanks, but that has nothing to do with what I just said 😅 I was only trying to bring extra discussion on vertex snapping. I wrote nothing on texturing.

[@dumdum93]

Weird seeing you involved in non-Dota contents lol

[@rvdxpress]

Fantastic video! I do remember first time seeing the graphics of the PS1 and being blown away. Woooow, 3D environments. What a time to be alive!

[@Jermaine_Jones]

10:50 I think features were left out to control the engineering costs. Remember, this was after the failed joint console collaboration with Nintendo. Money was spent so they wanted to quickly put a console out to market to compete and to recover some of the engineering costs with the project. I could be wrong but this is just my guess.

[@kzz0r]

Even back in the day those things would bother me so much... We had reached the highest point of 2D and OST masterpieces, then suddenly we were playing primitive 3D stuff that often (hi N64) came without BGM.

[@idrinkmilk282]

kzz0r and if we didn’t make that transition we wouldn’t have the games we have today.

[@r.l.royalljr.3905]

I remember hearing a story a long time ago about a dev team porting a game from another platform (N64? PC?) over to PS1. Somehow most of their generalized code just worked perfectly and they were super ahead of schedule for their release date but then one of the testers found out that he couldn't finish the first level. At random points on the map the tester just fell out of the bottom. It was impossible to reproduce on demand, but if you walked around for a while you'd just drop right out of the level without warning. It turns out that the dev team didn't know about the PS1 geometry being integer only and all of their level models were designed with floating points, so massive numbers of ground polygons weren't actually connected to each other anymore. The coordinate scaling was pretty high so you couldn't actually see the gaps but if you hit a polygon edge just right, you'd slip between the cracks and fall right out of the bottom of the level geometry. Fixing everything by hand would have taken an additional year or so which would have destroyed their release date so they had the testers run each level over and over again and fixed the gaps where they'd fall through. After a few months of iterations of this there were certain rare cases where someone could hit a boundary at just the right speed/angle to clip through but it was almost impossible to do this accidentally so they just left the rest of the polygon gaps and shipped the game.

[@ThatTonnatoTenrec]

Do you know the name of the game perhaps? Still interesting story.

[@54356776]

Pubg ?

[@r.l.royalljr.3905]

I honestly don't remember what game it was. I think I read about it from a thread on the Something Awful forums maybe? It's been years since I read that story and I only remembered it when the part about PS1 being integer-only came up.

[@ThatTonnatoTenrec]

@@r.l.royalljr.3905 Ah, well still, cool story.

[@Nob1ej0n]

Interesting. Curious to know if it would have possible to pass a filter over the vertex data to convert them all to integers in the editor. Or if there'd be inconsistent rounding that'd cause even more gaps. Or if the map somehow didn't use triangle/polygonal geometry so that wasn't possible. It just seems like there had to be a better way to fix those bugs.

[@X150t]

I appreciate the in-depth explanation of this instead of something dumbed down. This is really fascinating stuff

[@LatitudeSky]

I remember exactly where I was the moment the PlayStation wowed me. Sony was wining and dining me at the time but the demo I got was just amazing. It was from the Taito game RayStorm. There's a level in an asteroid field and the whole 3D depth thing is used to full effect and everybody in my group audibly gasped. That plus Sony treating us like royalty really made fans for life. I've worked with a lot of huge companies on different things and Sony is right at the top in terms of how much effort they put into understanding what their guests and customers want. Or at least, they used to be. Not sure how it is today.

[@hiyashifalcion118]

Honestly, I felt the same, i still remember getting tons of free demo games. It was great

[@Walamonga1313]

They charge for online play now. They got greedy.

[@hiyashifalcion118]

Oh so true, I'm planning on moving back to pc if they make another console. After giving up on making new regular Ps4 games for the vr hype train, they then tried to bring back Playstation ones for no reason

[@Azlehria]

@@Walamonga1313 It's not purely greed. The infrastructure is _really_ expensive. I did a gig at a datacenter a few years ago, for a company that worked solely on online gaming back-end. Based on the cost figures I received, that single datacenter cage cost over 300 _million_ US dollars to fill up - and they had 2 others in my state alone. Add in the continuing costs for space rent, redundant connectivity to multiple Internet backbones, administration, maintenance . . ..

[@tHeWasTeDYouTh]

Reason for PS1 wobbling textures : The routines used for handling geometry and applying textures were known to carry some inaccuracies: GPU coordinates are limited to fixed-point units: That means no decimals (thus no precision), contributing to sudden jumps when polygons move slightly. As you know, affine transformations have no sense of depth, which may confuse the user’s perception when the camera is close to the model and is positioned perpendicular to the viewer. Finally, the smallest size of a polygon in this system is a pixel, making small polygons (no matter how small) to be rendered as a single pixel. Now, this means that textured polygons may lose part of their texture if their size becomes smaller than a pixel. Furthermore, complex models may suffer from edges constantly shaking. This effect is more apparent when using a small frame-buffer or rendering models at a distance. Modern systems tackled this by implementing sub-pixel resolution methods, which handles polygons using fractions of pixels. These explain why users may notice instabilities while playing some games. The effect is also referred as texture warping, some games often resorted to tessellation (dividing a big polygon into smaller ones) in order to reduce these unwanted effects, others just reduced the amount of textures in favour of solid colours.

[@Ehal256]

You can have accurate polygon rasterization with fixed-point math (fixed point are decimals, they just have a fixed decimal point, hence the name), the PS1 just didn't do it with enough accuracy. This was a known technique around that time, but it's possible the gpu engineers weren't aware of it, since it should not have caused any performance issues.

[@SerBallister]

@@Ehal256 PS2 GPU used fixed point coordinates. Strange they used integer coord precision on the PS1 when it had good gouraud+texture shading, texture blending was done in full 24bit and then converted to 16bit dithered for output to vram, so obviously it is internally using fixed point.

[@segaunited3855]

@@SerBallister PS2 didn't use a GPU.

[@SerBallister]

@@segaunited3855 It had the GS, Graphics synthesizer, A custom Sony chip. It was a semi-fixed function GPU with a programmable "vertex shader" (Done via another chip, it was a multi-chip graphics pipeline) I worked with the PS2 as an official developer (With access to official documentation) for about 5 years, ask me anything!

[@jSyndeoMusic]

My first time seeing a PS1 running was in 2010 or so. I grew up in a “Nintendo household”, and I expected graphics roughly on par with N64… only to see everything freaking wobbling and warping like crazy. I legit thought the GPU was faulty! I asked about it, and no one else in the room seemed to notice it. It’s freaking bugged me ever since, so I’m really glad you made this video that not only explains why it happens, but points out that it happens in the first place… because folks who grew up with it are apparently so used to it that their brains automatically tune it out. 🙃 So I’m really freaking glad Nintendo partnered with SGI, who clearly knew what they were doing when it came to 3D. I imagine if Nintendo had rolled their own graphics like Sony did here, the result would’ve probably not been much better, if at all.

[@Ericnorify]

It's interesting thinking back remembering that I did notice the wobbling, but I didn't care at the time. It just was what it was.

[@MrDukeeeey]

The reason for affine texture mapping was because the perspective division was very expensive. Every software renderer from this time period bumped into this limitation, since it was one of the biggest bottlenecks in rendering. The software renderer in quake I think did perspective division every 10 pixels i think. So the attribute interpolation issue was still there but not as noticeable.

[@MichaelPohoreski]

Ian Curtis Correct -- perspective correct texture mapping requires a division by Z PER pixel. Hideously expensive. Even Quake used a span of 8 pixels with a constant Z to keep the accuracy vs speed trade off reasonable. The PS1 used affine texture mapping which uses a "constant Z" for speed which is why triangles parallel to the camera's looking direction exhibit the most warping.

[@noop9k]

Still, Doom (on PC) has perspective and subpixel correct textures, even if with limitations on how they are oriented.

[@noop9k]

Michael Pohoreski also, moving polygonal objects in Quake used different rendering, with Z-buffer, but affine mapping. With smaller triangles, nobody noticed.

[@MrDukeeeey]

@@noop9k in doom for say walls the engine only needed to calculate 1/z and interpolate for the edge pixels at the top. The rest of the vertical pixels would have the same z value. This optimisation was only possible because walls can't be sloped in doom and the camera can't look up or down at an angle either.

[@noop9k]

Ian Curtis still, Carmack spent additional effort on subpixel precision. He didn’t have to. Also, while Doom exploits the fact that its constant-Z lines are strictly vertical or horizontal, there were PC games that used the same trick but with arbitrarily oriented constant-Z lines and therefore were able to apply perspective correction to arbitrary polygons.

[@leoleonvids]

I don't get it, did you confuse mipmapping with texture interpolation? There are plenty of games on the PS1 that have mipmapping, such as both Gran Turismos, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, etc. where you can notice the texture being swapped with a lower-res one when the camera is further away, especially when using resolution multipliers on an emulator. Plus the "bilinear" filter the N64 uses can be disabled by the game and be left with no interpolation (thus pixelated textures) but still have mipmapping. If memory serves, Quake has that as an option.

[@zummone]

The Spyro series and Crash games starting from 2 also make heavy use of pre-baked mipmapping, in Spyro's case, each texture is made to fit exactly in the 2kb texture cache for maximum rendering efficiency, even though you are technically able to pull from up to a 256x256 block of VRAM data if you're willing to take the performance hit.

[@MaxLebled]

If the texture is effectively swapped by game code instead of it being something 100% handled by the GPU based on the pixel to texel ratio then it's not "really" mipmapping as we've come to understand it, though, isn't it?

[@leoleonvids]

@@zummone A performance hit that would also depend on the console, knowing that VRAM was changed with SGRAM on the PS1 pretty early on (which does have faster transparency calculation but is slow at moving chunks of data and is also single-ported instead of multi-port)

[@zummone]

@@leoleonvids Nice, didn't know that. So technically in a void with no transparency, early PS1 models have faster VRAM transfer speeds and DMA?

[@leoleonvids]

@@zummone Reading up on it again, looks I misremembered. If I'm correct, the VRAM one would be faster at blitting. Also it seems SGRAM is faster at alpha blending but also Gouraud shading (the change between VRAM and SGRAM was when they changed from 5-bit to 8-bit shading on the GPU, if you've seen how early PS1's have really bad looking shading: i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0041/38/1500755346464.jpg ) However it seems the VRAM chip had smaller bandwith and higher latency (60ns compared to 30ns, for reference, Saturn's VRAM is 34ns,) and had to rely on cache. It might've been more true if they were the same bandwidth and latency. For reference: segaretro.org/Sega_Saturn/Hardware_comparison#Vs._PlayStation

[@baroncalamityplus]

If I remember correctly, it wasn't the cost as much as what was available at the time. The original PlayStation's 3d was developed 92-93 and released in 94 There wasn't even a single chip z-buffering solution till 95. The N64 was developed a full two years after the PlayStation was finalized and SGI was the only company able to do it at the time. (Though sun might have been doing it too, I am not sure) I am pretty sure FPU was left out due to costs.

[@fakegeek5462]

The PlayStation was bleeding edge in 94'. The pc wouldn't have a card capable of having true "3d" until 96' with voodoo 1.

[@KuraIthys]

@@fakegeek5462 Software rendering engines of the era say otherwise, but it's all relative. Descent released in 1994 and does full 3d in software (with some limitations imposed) - it's minimum spec is a 386, meaning it could've existed a few years earlier than it did in hardware requirements at least. That same year you had magic carpet, by 1995 you had terminal velocity, which is very much comparable to a playstation game yet runs entirely in software. And you had things like Wing Commander 3 around that era. Hardware 3d wasn't a thing on PC until late 96 indeed. But what the Playstation was doing was more comparable to software 3d as seen on PC's of the era than it was to true hardware 3d implementations. (not saying the Playstation is doing software rendering, because it isn't. But in terms of visual quality it might as well have been.)

[@segaunited3855]

@@fakegeek5462 No, it wasn't. SGI was out in 1993. And Nvidia NV1 was out in 1994.

[@TXFDA]

Neat. I was always curious about the wobbly models and textures. Appreciate the video! I actually specifically went looking for something like this because I recently started using the PS1 emulator 'Duckstation', and noticed some settings that remove the wobble, which got me curious.