The Truth About PS1 Graphics

[thethdoctor]

Garbaj is the only video game tech guy that can say “boob” without any jokes or other implication and have a reason to do so.

[Duspende]

Also, an important thing to mention was the resolution we were using back then. On something like the Crash Bandicoot clip you showed in the beginning, there's a noticeable low resolution, and also a lot of the things I feel a lot of developers get wrong is that they're focused on making things look "crappy" and not really thinking like a 90's, early 2000's developer trying to push the limits of what was available back then. Instead of trying to make a the game look dated, they should probably more look about how they tried to make dated games look good despite the limitations at the time.

[colormeblue]

never thought i'd see a low poly dva in my life

[yetidynamics]

They also all used Gouraud shading, which is where the surface normal is only calculated per vertex, and smoothed across the polygon. Modern gaming engines use per pixel shading which was basically impossible to do on hardware back then. this alleviated the flat look of just basic ambient lightning, as it's very fast, but it isn't accurate.

[johnclark]

One thing I’ve noticed that’s missing in a lot of PS1-styled games is the lack of pre-rendered CGI sprites and billboards. Of course the low-poly environments and characters are a major part of the iconography of the 5th generation of gaming, but I feel like people seriously overlook the amount of pre-rendered CGI that was shoved into literally every game of the era.
From Crash’s Wumpa Fruit, to Resident Evil’s backgrounds, pre-rendered CGI through billboards or sprites are an integral part of the PS1 aesthetic, and I feel a lot of games stray away from authenticity when there’s absolutely 0 pre-rendered CGI to be found. Something as simple as pre-rendered item icons or character heads for the HUD would do so much to immerse yourself into believing the game was made when developers were desperate to make their games look as 3D as possible.

[jAujAl]

The other thing you didn't mention is that directional lighting makes low polygons count more noticeable, by highlighting the hard edges of the models where light reflects at different angles of incidence. It's particularly noticeable at 2:35 where you can see how D.Va's face looks like an origami, whereas as soon as you switch to flat lighting, the angles suddenly vanish into a much more uniform and smooth shape.

Directional lighting doesn't only hurt a retro game's aesthetic because it looks more graphically demanding, it also actively hurts the illusion of low-poly models from looking more detailed than they actually are. Low poly models rely entirely on a flat lighting in order to work, whereas directional lighting needs a higher polygon count to round up hard edges in order to not look ugly.

[EnohGaming]

Don't forget to turn off mip-maps (unless going for N64). The PS1 rarely had mip-maps so you were often staring at a lot of aliased pixels in the distance.

[GoodmansGhost]

I wish more indie devs paid attention to this aspect of retro graphics.

[kalanivernon]

The other factor, is that oldschool video games were designed for CRT screens - and used shortcuts to make use of the blurring effect on CRT to make the image better. It's why ports of say Sonic & Knuckles look blocky on modern screens. Because on a CRT, the TVs natural limitations actually added a smoothing effect

[waylonmorristexas]

I just realized how much of a child I am 🤣 I laughed so hard when he said boobs

[robertcop]

I spent countless days on PS1 games while growing up and almost all of it has been burned into my brain. As a result, I can't help but notice 90% or more of these "demakes" fall short of really hitting the mark. Your video is a good step along those dev's journey to accuracy, thank you.

[clementm]

I wanted to add something that was used in most ps1 games : Dithering.

The console stored 24 bits textures but rendered them on the screen in 15 bits. It was meant to give the illusion of increasing the the amount of colors with a shading effect, once again for Old crt tvs. It was smoothed because of the way our old analog signals worked : Basically it blurred and softened the picture. It prevented you from noticing the image flickering too. The final output was nice and smooth, you could not notice anything.

[rafaelbordoni]

Turning off anti aliasing also helps, as well as taking down the resolution. I still think that's not enough because the displays we had back then (CRT TVs) worked very differently than the monitors we use today, so some people apply post processing shaders that try to replicate some side effects of CRT TVs.

[venny]

I would like to add a couple tricks about lighting. Since this video seems a bit more skewed towards the PS1 look than the N64 look (they are quite different), I've been doing some research to emulate the lighting and appearance of N64 games, but very specifically how Majora's Masked worked in order to get that moody lighting.

You can still use directional lights to light your scenes, however there are two things to take into consideration. The more obvious one would be to disable the directional shadows. The second, and I think most convincing one to get that N64 feel, is to use Vertex Lighting. Not so much painting the lighting on the vertex colors (although this can also be used for further effect and combined with Vertex Lighting), but modern engines will calculate lights per-pixel, instead of per-vertex.


While I don't know the specifics of how to achieve this effect in other engines, you seem to use Godot more, which is where I've been doing said research. This has to be set up on the materials, in one of their Flags, to enable Vertex Lighting. Doing so for every material in the game can be time consuming though, but fortunately there's an option in Project Settings > Quality > Force Vertex Shading that forces this option on all materials.

Combining a rather low ambient light color to have at least a base color for shadows (seriously this is something those annoying unreal engine videos seem to just forget exists, pure black shadows are horrible), you can then add color with a couple of directional lights. There's generally always a white-ish one, and then one or two colored fill lights.

[movezig]

I think it's also important to note that the original PlayStation in particular didn't use floating point numbers in it's coordinates (if I'm remembering that right), and it also had built-in dithering.

[Gunbudder]

mgs2 was one of the best textured games ever made, even to this day. they had wall textures that were "fully 3d" in that they showed very detailed elements like pipes and the shadows they cast on other parts of the wall. all of it was entirely textured

[Chafmere]

The TVs we used back in the day also played a part in the way things looked. You can boot up an emulator on a modern monitor and it will look nothing like the game used to.

[Srelathon]

There's also the fact that these games were played on CRT monitors with much lower resolution which not only was made it easier to get away with worse graphics it was often intentionally used and games were specifically made with those kinds of screens in mind, so when you take it onto a much higher resolution monitor it's not having those same kind of filters applied and is going to look different.

[ajdude]

Something I feel like a lot of people miss (even in the big industries) is the fact that old graphics weren't *just* 'low-poly'. It's incredibly noticeable in character designs like 'retro Crash Bandicoot' in the N.Sane Trilogy and related games. They show a really low poly Crash model, but he looks nothing like the real old Crash looked like, as a lot of it was done with a sort of squash-and-stretch approach rather than just low poly counts (as well as the fact that the Naughty Dog tried to fit as many polygons as they could onto the screen at once).

[GiuseppeGaetanoSabatelli]

There's something fascinating about the "Between Times."
You know. The era of 2002-2005ish. Look at Doom 3. Everything is almost a Claymation like effect.
Or Splinter Cell, with its insanely high detail look, the Xbox version somehow still standing up to this day...
I'd say Crysis in 2007 ended this era of retro-but-not-so-retro 3D graphics.