Why PlayStation 1 Graphics Warped and Wobbled so much | MVG

Every wondered why the Sony PlayStation 1 graphics were warped, or why they jittered and wobbled around - especially compared to the Nintendo 64? In this video we take a look at the cause and how they could have been avoided.

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#PlayStation #AffineTextures #SubPrecisionPixels

[roberte]

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

[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.

[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?

[metcaelfe]

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

[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

[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.

[joshsmith]

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

[jaceybella]

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

[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.

[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.

[horsthacker]

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.

[dr]

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.

[juniorgod]

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

[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.

[AbacusManify]

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

[opedromagico]

4:40 - 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

[Eliyahu]

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.

[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.

[RaspySquares]

who else spent hours playing those demo discs...

[AB-kxty]

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.