N64 graphics still look gorgeous almost 30 years later
- Thread starter RetroGamingUK
- Start date
cireza
Member
And I will add that I definitely agree with the fact that N64 was much better suited to push nice 3D, without all the issues known on Saturn and PS1 with wobbling, texture stretching etc...
NeoIkaruGAF
Gold Member
Bowser below may be low-poly with low-res textures, but for me what I love is the use of colour, lighting and blending.
Oh, good pick!
I remember the early pics of SM64 Bowser on magazines. That was some hype-generating shit, not the copypaste trailers of today.
This single model blew every PS/Saturn owner's socks off (myself included) when it was first revealed. Whoever denies this either had a cutting-edge PC, or is lying to themselves. And yes, it still looks good today.
I clearly remember reading that the whole of FF7 was contained on all three discs. The only difference was the FMVs.
Proof? If you switched discs while a FMV was playing, the game would still load all the data from any disc.
I never tried this myself, but I never saw this debunked either.
Maybe the whole game wouldn't fit on a 64MB cart, and the FMVs were FF7's main selling point anyway. But the actual content of the game didn't need 3 discs to be played in full.
And yet SOTN exists mainly because it's a 1997 game. Just one year later, when 5th-gen 3D really hit its stride, it's hard to imagine SOTN would have been greenlit. Castlevania 64 is the game it is, mostly because of this: 2D was out of fashion, and it would be for a long time.
The reason you can easily play SOTN today is because it's a fan favorite with a cult following. If CV64 had been successful, we'd have seen it rereleased as well. 2D has nothing to so with that.
This is not to say that CV64 looks amazing, or that SOTN isn't a 2D masterpiece. Just that you are inferring wrong conclusions from biased premises.
nkarafo
Member
I don't know about FF7 specifically, but i do know most of the data in the Resident Evil discs is the same.
I also used to download a lot of PS1 ISOS back in the day. And this is where i found out that games don't always use the whole CD space, regardless of having FMVs or not. And there are games that use a very small portion. So small, they could easily fit into a N64 cart without any changes. I remember a Rainbow Six PS1 game that used less than 20MB in the whole disc.
What people don't understand about CDs is that they were never really pushed as the default medium for games because of their size. It's not like they decided games need 700MB of space so the industry needs CDs. The ONLY reason CDs were used was because of their tiny production costs. It was something for the benefit of all the publishers who didn't want to risk it with cartridges anymore. The extra size was just an unintended benefit for consumers. Let's face it, every decision that gets made is always for the publisher's benefit, they never gave a single drop of shit for the consumers or even the developers.
I mean, forget about the PS1 and all the textures and pre-rendered backgrounds you can fit, how about the earlier 16bit CD consoles? Is there anyone who thinks they needed all that space for graphics and content? All they had was FMVs and redbook audio or voice acting, very rarely CD releases had extra content over their cart ports.
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Xaeroxcore666
Member
Not a Nintendo, Sony or Sega fan, so dont understand your point. Are you pretty much a Sony fanboy, arent ya?
They have pretty much answered ya, but from my end i would like to see proof of PS1 games above Conker and Perfect Dark.
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nkarafo
Member
False. Perfect Dark has a 9-60 fps range.
N64 games also run at 30 or 60fps. Not all games suffer from unstable frame rates.
And there are games than render at 640x480 without the expansion pack, i even posted an example.
BlackTron
Member
He's a troll, let it go.
Drell
Member
And you don't look better, defending your dear PS1 tooth and nail...
PS1 had horribly unfiltered and distorded textures along with unstable polygons. I was impressed once with this console, it was with Tekken because it was the first time I was seeing textured 3D but once I saw Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye, I suddently couldn't apprciate the mess that was PS1's 3D. Then I got a PC and N64 also looked bad to me.
The truth is this whole generation is like Atari 2600 gen of the 3D. These machines were just powerful enough to output something barely acceptable, but now it looks ugly. Fortunately, these days we have recomp for N64 to get rid of these horrible framerate and emulator like Duckstation with stable geometry so I can finally play PS1 games without wanting to puke.
The only real fuckiong dumb decision took for the 5th will forever be Nintendo sticking to their shitty small and costly cartridges and not at least use their magnetic DD disks from the start, since they didn't want to give money to Sony for CDs.
nkarafo
Member
I know but my replies are not for him, they are for the potential newbies who may read this thread and get misinformed by him.
There's already too much misinformation and unfair bad rap for this particular console and who knows how many people have missed some of it's great game experiences because of that. At least before most of it's good games got ported, remastered or decompiled.
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ecosse_011172
Banned
Let's face it, everything pre-Gamecube looks like utter dogshit nowadays.
It's like arguing if your Alsatian dogshit is better than your friend's poodle dogshit
It's like arguing if your Alsatian dogshit is better than your friend's poodle dogshit
killatopak
Member
I was agreeing until I put on my glasses.
cireza
Member
Indeed. There is a lot of duplicate data between multi-discs games. Unless you make a it a linear game with no backtracking. But anything open, with a world you can freely revisit, is bound to have a ton of duplicated data.
If I remember correctly, the first 2 discs of FF XIII have these insanely good cutscenes with the super high resolution models. But when you reach the final disc, as the entire world is put again on the disc + the ending, you don't get these high models cutscenes anymore and it is only the low resolution models talking.
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Sportler
Member
RetroGamingUK
Member
Drell
Member
Not next to what I had on PC, and soul calibur dreamcast came 1 year later.
Parazels
Member
You couldn't get anything close to Tekken 3 or Virtua Fighter 2 on a personal calculator back in the 90s.
And nothing has changed since then.
Midway-AGNC-
Member
That's actually a really interesting point. It lines up with how Resident Evil 2 was able to make it onto a 64MB N64 cart — something people swore was impossible at the time. The reality is, a huge portion of disc space on PS1 games was taken up by FMVs and audio, not core gameplay data.
This is also why the old "N64 can't handle PS1 games" narrative doesn't hold up. The hardware could absolutely run them — the real limitation was storage format and Nintendo's costly cartridges. Once a developer was willing to optimize and compress (like Angel Studios did with RE2), it proved that the N64 was capable of handling games that many assumed were "too big."
There's even a story that before taking on Resident Evil 2, Angel Studios approached SquareSoft about porting Final Fantasy VII to the N64. Square declined, not wanting to work with Nintendo at the time. So Angel turned to Capcom, and Shinji Mikami accepted. That decision not only led to RE2's impressive N64 port, but also sparked Mikami's relationship with Nintendo, which eventually culminated in the GameCube exclusivity deal years later.
So when people act like FFVII on N64 was some unthinkable impossibility, the history around RE2 shows that it wasn't about technical incapability — it was about business choices and format differences.
Drell
Member
I'll give you this for the Arcade version of VF2 because the Model 2 was truely groundbreaking, but the modified PS1 hardware Namco used for Tekken 3 was inferior to a PC with a good GPU.
Parazels
Member
I don't care, I don't use those ugly glitchy calculators regardless of their hardware.
Geometric-Crusher
"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
Ocarina of Time is 17fps-20fps at most, very bad on crt
but you can think as you want, N64 games always looked bad due to inferior textures of that system , 99% of a game is about textures and as all N64 games have low quality textures nullifying any hypothetical advantage provided by the expansion pack ; therefore all N64 games are uglier than the PS1 games. this is very simple.
Geometric-Crusher
"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
the difficult thing is to prove it
No one cares if it's 60 fps when you look at the skybox; it's a miracle that it reaches 20 fps during normal gameplay. Who are you kidding?
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Midway-AGNC-
Member
There are too many people in this thread with yearslight better arguments and information than him, which makes him look dumb as a result. At this point, he's nothing but a attention-seeking joke and shouldn't be taken seriously.
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Better than psx for sure but the original texture resolution is awful.Baffling thread you might think.
After all, many will say that this generation of consoles has aged like milk, that the graphics were blurry with low poly counts.
For me, this is all part of the charm.
I love the smoothed out look with bold and beautiful colours blending together, it's all very psychedelic.
Aliasing and rough textures are absolutely crushed by anti-aliasing, it all looks so un-game-like.
For me, I'd love to see Nintendo return to this style (albeit with higher resolution and more polygons).
So, what say you GAF?
Like no? Texture warping of PSX is far more annoying than the blur on N64 and still a plague on ps5 too. Also N64 handle a lot more poly than PSX. Yeah PSX can handle CGI and prerendering even higher resolution on textures but it's almost useless with the lack of Z buffer because everything appears broken; it's still a tough issue to fix via emulation even today and remain the most horrid artifact to see in a game imo. I'm saying that knowing PSX was an incredible hardware at the time more, impressive than N64 but today its limitations still remain the more annoying.
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RetroGamingUK
Member
On a technical level, yes
On an artistic level, no, the blending for me is a lovely artstyle, albeit mostly unintentional
Unfortunately N64 RAM suck and neither the Ultrapack fixed it. Texture runs at 1/4 of resolution of the PSX and the difference it's almost embarassing. But in terms of poly counts it beats easily PSX especially in full 3D games.
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kevboard
Member
the PS1's 3D capabilities were basically a hack. all it could really do is fast polygon calculations, and nearly any other aspect of 3D rendering were done in a hackjob kinda way.
so you had constant z-fighting between close together objects or geomety that is close together, because all the system could do is sort the whole surface according to what's closer to the camera.
constant texture warping due to no perspective correction, which meant anything close to the camera had to be more and more subdivided into tons of polygons just to not disorient the player with excessive warping.
and of course it lacked the ability to do floating point calculations, which meant polygons just snapped to a grid and could at no point move smoothly.
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We have to say at the launch was quite an incredible hardware for a console. It wasn't that easy achieve such 3D rendering (fake or less) even on pc. Direct X was atrocious at the time.
Drell
Member
Pixelated, texture warping all around the screen and 16 bit color dept... Absolutely nothing impressive about this. I'll never understand people thinking THIS was more impressive than N64 graphics...just dropping in to tell you guys that this is a 20fps PS1 game:
kevboard
Member
that's true. it released at a time when 3D rendering was mostly done on the CPU in software.
but the result was very unstable looking graphics, especially if not properly handled by the Devs.
in a way it was similar to 3D on the GBA. the GBA basically had all the same limitations, and due to the lack of power it resulted in even worse results there. as devs didn't have enough power to subdivide every surface... so texture warping was off the charts on that thing
.probably the main reason so few devs did 3D stuff on the GBA. although, that one Quake tech demo had software based texture correction and looked insanely impressive.
Drell
Member
But as I told you, back then I didn't care about all of this, everything was blurry but smooth, not a fucking mess of polygons warping and pixelated texture zigzaging all around the place. If you can't have a stable 3D, what's the point of having cool HQ textures? Most N64 games had ugly blurry texture but in some games like DK64 you had good textures AND stable geometry, while top PS1 games will forever (well except on duckstation) be a messs of characters having parkinson on trippy distorded universe.
Romulus
Member
but even when PS1 textures were "good" it almost always came with its own caveats, huge in most cases.
Romulus
Member
The craziest part is PS1 outsold N64 by a huge margin, way more fans like myself on these forums, but the majority will admit N64 was superior graphically. If it weren't for about 15 examples on N64, PS1 would have a much better argument that it was basically equal. But they pushed N64 enough at the end to show that 3x cpu and RAM advantage, working around the shitty limitations with coding and hardware.
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RetroGamingUK
Member
PS1 just had a broader library covering all genres and age groups.
Around 1998 though sales took off and people bought them because everyone knew someone who had one.
It was the best bet that gen, but it's slight superiority doesn't match its ginormous marketshare.
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NeverYouMind
Member
Nintendo stans in this thread:
Romulus
Member
Have you played Diddy Kong Racing? That game absolutely holds up on emulators pushing the resolution, unlike 95% of everything else that generation that doesn't.
Hudo
Member
I do agree with the N64 being technically superior to its contemporaries in many ways. However, I do think that that generation of consoles was primitive enough that it allowed some devs to just cheat visual effects in really neat ways to make shit look good. Take Vagrant Story, one the best looking PS1 games, a lot of the lighting-related effects are cheated. From the common technique of baking lights to the cool technique of silhouetting characters with a colored line to make them appear lit from the side or behind. It's at least on par with many N64 games.
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6502
Member
Never played it (so can't comment on the gameplay) but videos I can see look clunky, lots of loading doors and certainly not as pretty or smooth as perfect dark in normal resolution mode. Tbh House of the dead on Saturn looks better.
Have you got examples of the best areas I should look for?
Romulus
Member
It looks horrible. I think he's joking. Its known as terrible.
6502
Member
So many odd claims in here I honestly can't tell anymore.
nordique
Member
Sure
Just make sure they're not any emulator up rezzed up textured bs and in their native warped self
Nothing on ps1 came close to perfect dark or conker or turok or rogue squadron or even Zelda
Like why can't people let both of these consoles rest in legend peace. Both fantastic.
N64 is a more powerful system I am sorry if that hurts your feelings
nordique
Member
Well said