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[Toadthemushroom]

That's pretty cool! Whole map reminds me of a huge Zelda-like dungeon area.

 

[zoukka]

Yeah, the separate areas weren't that big, but were all connected to each other, like in Souls games.

Here's the map.

It's pretty amazing, that you could travel all across that without loading pauses on the PS1. To my understanding the next area was loaded in the background, when you travelled inbetween them.

Yeah not enough games used a similar streaming technique on PS1, the long loading times were something that definitely fueled the fanboy wars back in the day :b

That's pretty cool! Whole map reminds me of a huge Zelda-like dungeon area.

That's why there are so many corridors in that map also. Metroid Prime uses a similar method but just masks the loading with the delayed door opening.

 

[JordanN]

Looking back, this thread was funny for me. Early on I made pro N64 comments and then I went pro PS1 based off specs I was reading. I was young and went off a naive mindset.

That said, having a much more informed viewpoint on game art, I think there's too much hyperbole being passed around. N64 was more powerful but I don't think it represented a difference where games were 100% impossible to do on the other system.

That's where the Dreamcast came in and showed what extra processing power could really do. N64 was putting out visuals that where a lot cleaner in some ways that PS1's hardware naturally couldn't compete without some serious programming tricks but everything else about it was comparable to PS1 in every way.

It also helps PS1 had the lionshares of almost every game developer backing the thing. The talents of Rare and Factor 5 where doing amazing things on the N64 but it's not like these efforts left PS1 behind as game developers were still putting out a plethora of software and pushing every genre imaginable.

 

[FUNKNOWN iXi]

Zelda would cry if you did.

Trees don't look like that by you?

 

[Ruud_Luiten]

Let's give examples of open world games from the generation that was:

Grand Theft Auto 2 (Pretty sure this is a suped up port too)

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Hahaha, what is this? Random PC port vs custom build game specially for the system?

That's nice.

 

[The_Endgamer]

Hahaha, what is this? Random PC port vs custom build game specially for the system?

That's nice.

I can't find screenshots from the Playstation version that aren't from ROM sites so no, I'm not going to post the even worse version of the game (from a disreputable website that could get me banned). Google it yourself.

 

[Ruud_Luiten]

N64 was definitely more powerful, but all those games using that AA... I feel like PS1 visuals have aged somewhat better.

This; blurrovision and low fps don't help N64 titles

 

[Melchiah]

That's pretty cool! Whole map reminds me of a huge Zelda-like dungeon area.

Soul Reaver is still one of my all-time favorites. =)

Yeah not enough games used a similar streaming technique on PS1, the long loading times were something that definitely fueled the fanboy wars back in the day :b

That's why there are so many corridors in that map also. Metroid Prime uses a similar method but just masks the loading with the delayed door opening.

I remember those days. This thread is kinda like a trip down the memory lane. =D

As far as I know, it was the first and only game at the time, that had real-time environment morphing as well.

 

[iamaustrian]

Even all my hardcore PS fanboy friends were actually blown away when they first saw "Mario 64", Wave Race, Zelda OoT, Goldeneye etc etc.

There were indeed some N64 games that actually really felt a generation ahead compared to PS games. I'm talking purely about realtime graphics btw and not FMVs, prerendered stuff etc.

I remember that the most impressive game was without a doubt Pilotwings 64.
That HUGE world with no fog and a ridiculously detailed enviroment has not been seen before.
but the best thing was how well everything looked even at close up. things like the visible pavers on the ground (9:28 here) were just impossible to do in this quality on the playstation.
same goes to the fucking fence(1:08 here) and the tiles (0:24 here) in Goldeneye. Highclass texture quality

also: (I know it's basicly a different and newer game but) Doom 64 looked almost 2 generations ahead compared to the playstation PC port.

 

[DSix]

Console war never changes.

To me the N64 generally had more humph and just looked a lot nicer with stable polygons and larger areas visible at a time, and generally higher resolution, especially on PAL tvs.

 

[jett]

This thread is 4 years old btw

Transcending history and the world, a tale of console wars, eternally re-told.

All I want to know is how they managed to fit a game the size of Super Mario 64 on around an 8mb cartridge while Crash Bandicoot is about 400mb

Spoiler

I don't know how compression works

I'm gonna guess CD-quality redbook audio is the reason why.

Crash does have much higher quality textures than Mario 64 though.

 

[Italia64]

And textures aside, Conker is rendering far, far more on-screen, has animated environments/objects, realtime shadows, much more advanced lighting and particle effects and so much more.

DewPrism's environments are entirely static, more barren and the character models are basic (no moving mouths like Conker's), and the lighting is flat. Heck, that's cutscene gameplay and the characters don't even have simple circle shadows.

Yes of course. Not even a PS game can stand in front of Conker:

- flawless draw distance
- some textures are unmatched
- amazing dynamic shadows who follows different lights, surfaces, stairs, walls, etc.
- dynamic lighting in every single centimeter of game, sometimes tons of different dynamic lighting at the same time
- multilayered transparencies
- mirrored surfaces which reflex everything
- ears animation
- fantastic elaborated tail animation which follows movement and sensations of the character
- facial animation, Conker's perfectly textured blended eyes moves and look everywhere, Conker has tons of different facial expressions in-game and during cut-scenes
- lip synch unmatched in that generation
- clothes animations
- motion blur
- NPC characters with tons of animations and lip synched
- environment animations
- water physics (in War stage)
-smooth frame rate (only occasional drops but every reviewer agrees that are never annoying)
- free cameras

And much more.

Add the game doesn't show not ever one cartridge limit (more than two hours of speeches, tons of sounds effects, amazing variety of musics, Dolby Surround, etc.) and you don't have loading times.
Conker is not only the best graphics game of the gen, it's also technically the best game of the gen.

And I didn't even describe every detail. Conker graphical features literally deserve a dedicated description for each level. I never manage to play it without noticing some new amazing features.

Only people very ignorant in matter of graphics can think that N64 doesn't have the best graphics of the entire generation.

Look this video after 5m30s and you will see all the effects on screen at the same time:
https://youtu.be/J-2UuMSzPro

 

[Timu]

Yes of course. Not even a PS game can stand in front of Conker:

- flawless draw distance
- some textures are unmatched
- amazing dynamic shadows who follows different lights, surfaces, stairs, walls, etc.
- dynamic lighting in every single centimeter of game, sometimes tons of different dynamic lighting at the same time
- multilayered transparencies
- mirrored surfaces which reflex everything
- ears animation
- fantastic elaborated tail animation which follows movement and sensations of the character
- facial animation, Conker's perfectly textured blended eyes moves and look everywhere, Conker has tons of different facial expressions in-game and during cut-scenes
- lip synch unmatched in that generation
- clothes animations
- motion blur
- NPC characters with tons of animations and lip synched
- environment animations
- water physics (in War stage)
-smooth frame rate (only occasional drops but every reviewer agrees that are never annoying)
- free cameras

And much more.

Add the game doesn't show not ever one cartridge limit (more than two hours of speeches, tons of sounds effects, amazing variety of musics, Dolby Surround, etc.) and you don't have loading times.
Conker is not only the best graphics game of the gen, it's also technically the best game of the gen.

And I didn't even describe every detail. Conker graphical features literally deserve a dedicated description for each level. I never manage to play it without noticing some new amazing features.

Only people very ignorant in matter of graphics can think that N64 doesn't have the best graphics of the entire generation.

Look this video after 5m30s and you will see all the effects on screen at the same time:
https://youtu.be/J-2UuMSzPro

Yep, Conker pretty much pushed the N64 showing off what it could do.

 

[Lord Error]

Let's give examples of open world games from the generation that was:

Grand Theft Auto 2 (Pretty sure this is a suped up port too)

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Was Zelda really an open world game? It was more like a series of hubs where I think the game would fade out from one scene to the next (loading from the cartridge was very quick though).
For that kind of thing, there was Soul Reaver on PS1, which didn't even have any visible loading between hubs.

Transcending history and the world, a tale of console wars, eternally re-told.

I'm gonna guess CD-quality redbook audio is the reason why.

Crash does have much higher quality textures than Mario 64 though.

I'm also pretty sure Crash was running in 512x224 resolution, so pretty high by the standards of back then. The game looked really good overall. I really think that people saying "nothing on PS1 looks as good as even Mario 64" are wrong, at least partially. Mario is impressive because of the more free roaming scenes, but in terms of pure visuals, I think Crash is really ahead. Hell, even an impressive game like Conker just looks really blurry overall when you compare it to Crash games (unfair comparison because Crash is linear, I know, but Crash games really did what they did very well, visually).

 

[Toadthemushroom]

Was Zelda really an open world game? It was more like a series of hubs where I think the game would fade out from one scene to the next (loading from the cartridge was very quick though).
For that kind of thing, there was Soul Reaver on PS1, which didn't even have any visible loading between hubs.

I wouldn't really define an open world game by loading method but by design.

As stated in a Digital Foundry episode though, the major limitation to making large, open worlds on PlayStation wasn't loading but how most of the polygon budget went towards limiting polygon warping due to the system's lack of Z-buffering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuXEnukk--k&feature=youtu.be&t=516

Developers could create much larger levels on a much smaller polygon budget, basically, which enabled more sandbox- or exploration-style games like Rocket: Robot on Wheels, Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Conker 64. All these games had huge levels with massive draw distances that you could explore freely, whereas something like Soul Reaver never renders that much on-screen at once.

Still, I'm really impressed by how Soul Reaver loads in its world, I struggle to think of a similar game in the same genre/style that gen which also did that.

 

[RankFTW]

N64 had Diddy Kong Racing so it wins by default.

 

[MrChocolate]

Let's give examples of open world games from the generation that was:

Grand Theft Auto 2 (Pretty sure this is a suped up port too)

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Ocarina of Time is Open World? By that standard, both Driver games on PS1 are open world.

 

[March of the Crabs]

N64 had Diddy Kong Racing so it wins by default.

Honestly that game is super underappreciated in terms of what it did and how good it looks. I think I'll force the girlfriend to play it with me tonight...

 

[CREMSteve]

Soul Reaver was a technical marvel at the time. Probably stands out as tops of the gen, visually, for me.

Tomba! 2 and Klonoa were both killer looking platformers, too.

 

[Corronchilejano]

Ocarina of Time is Open World? By that standard, both Driver games on PS1 are open world.

They're also extremely basic games. The draw distance on Driver 1 is ridiculously low.

Still the best Driver game ever made.

 

[CREMSteve]

Driver 1 is still easily the most fun I've ever had in a driving game, bar none. That last mission was pure insanity. Completely ludicrous. So, so fun.

 

[iamaustrian]

N64 also had the best looking 3d fighter. Mace-The dark age is basicly an arcade perfect port running at a lower resolution. I'm still amazed how they could archive that on the N64 hardware.
Bio Freaks ran and looked surprisingly good too

 

[Lord Error]

Many surfaces in the game are blurry, other medium quality and other the best of the generation. Usually the best are the ones on characters.
Try to watch it on CRT, you can count Conker's hairs, I'm not joking.

That's the thing - the overall impression that Conker leaves (on me, at least) is that the game looks impressive but with very blurry textures overall. Having a very detailed textured detail in a few spots doesn't do much to remedy this.
On the other hand, even if something like Dew Prism or Metal Gear has what I'd describe as medium quality textures, they are more evenly distributed everywhere, for an overall much less blurry presentation.

I absolutely love all the tech and techniques employed in Conker, don't get me wrong, but the game does leave an impression of "OMG Blur" when you just look at it, without thinking much about anything that it's doing in terms of tech.

 

[KingV]

This is what I've always wondered about. Why on earth do PS1 models do that freaky jig when they move/the camera moves compared to the N64?

Lack of a z buffer on psx, I believe.

 

[jett]

N64 also had the best looking 3d fighter. Mace-The dark age is basicly an arcade perfect port running at a lower resolution. I'm still amazed how they could archive that on the N64 hardware.
Bio Freaks ran and looked surprisingly good too

Mace is pretty ugly, man. Like really ugly. And I'm not sure it even runs at 30fps.

 

[HTupolev]

Lack of a z buffer on psx, I believe.

No.

Polygon edges wobble because vertex locations are essentially snapped to the pixel grid. "No subpixel precision."

Textures further swim/wobble/whatever because the texture projection method on PS1 is crude and inaccurate, it's not "perspective correct."

Z-buffer is a different matter, used for per-pixel sorting. On N64 (and newer stuff), when a pixel is drawn to the screen into the main image, the hardware also draws its depth from the camera into a second image. When a new object is getting drawn at that same pixel, the hardware can use the depth image to check whether the new object is closer or farther than the old object; if farther, the new object doesn't get drawn at that pixel.
PS1 didn't have this functionality; the GPU wasn't really aware of the depth of a vertex's depth, and when you told it to draw a triangle it just drew the triangle into the image. So, everything had to be carefully sorted before being drawn, in order for nearer polygons to appear in front of farther polygons and whatnot.

People often claim that the non-perspective-correct texturing and the lack of a z-buffer are the same thing, but this isn't exactly true; you could technically have a system with a z-buffer and no perspective-correct texturing, and vise versa. However, the two features do have some redundancies, i.e. they both require that vertex depth be known, so they're usually implemented alongside each other.

 

[Beerman462]

There were a lot of pretty games on PS1, but I never considered it to be a powerful system. The CD definitely made it flashier.

Mario 64, Zelda and especially Wave Race were always more impressive and made the 64 feel more powerful.

 

[HTupolev]

All I want to know is how they managed to fit a game the size of Super Mario 64 on around an 8mb cartridge while Crash Bandicoot is about 400mb

Spoiler

I don't know how compression works

Because SM64 doesn't actually have that much detail. Poly density is very low. Textures are heavily tiled and many are extremely low-res, there's lots of reuse. Soundtrack is kept small the same ways all vintage cartridge game soundtracks are kept small: not using tons and tons of unique high-fidelity sampling.

The trick is that they constructed the art style around big simple shapes and smooth gradients, and relied on the N64's capabilities to cleanly render it out. It looks good precisely because it doesn't try to be something that should need more than 8MB.

 

[petran79]

N64 also had the best looking 3d fighter. Mace-The dark age is basicly an arcade perfect port running at a lower resolution. I'm still amazed how they could archive that on the N64 hardware.
Bio Freaks ran and looked surprisingly good too

At that time no console or computer platform was powerful enough to match top arcade hardware.

Eg Mortal Kombat 4 ports had to make graphics concessions both to the console and computer versions. Even the Windows version that supported 3DFX acceleration was inferior.

Midway claimed that Zeus arcade hardware had 10x the power of Nintendo64.
I assume Mace's Atari Seattle hardware was equal to or even more powerful than Zeus

 

[Curufinwe]

Looking back, this thread was funny for me. Early on I made pro N64 comments and then I went pro PS1 based off specs I was reading. I was young and went off a naive mindset.

That said, having a much more informed viewpoint on game art, I think there's too much hyperbole being passed around. N64 was more powerful

http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I kind of had a suspicion that things weren’t going too well for the 64 at that point, because … one of my responsibilities … was to write performance applications that compared how well the 64 fared against the prototype [PlayStation]. And we’d be running parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you’d have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second. And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]. Of course, the drawback of the [PlayStation] is it didn’t really have a z-buffer, so you’d have these overlapping polygons that you’d have to work around so that you wouldn’t get the shimmering [look]. But on the other hand, there was no way you’d be able to get anything close to what FF7 was doing [on PlayStation] on the 64 at that time.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I’ll say this. I’m impressed with what Nintendo [was] able to do with the 64 hardware. Mario, Zelda — their devs must be top notch to be able to do that. But that’s essentially the extent of what you can do with the hardware. And you would get nowhere near anything like a Final Fantasy running on it.

 

[AppleBlade]

If it was more powerful it wasn't in an obvious or jaw dropping sort of way.

I disagree. The PS1 was my favorite system of all time and I would never trade my experiences with Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the experiences on N64 but I can not lie that I had a pang of jealousy whenever I saw N64 games in action at my cousins house.

N64 games just felt so solid and had a sense of 3d space that PS1 games couldn't quite match. The Zelda games, Banjo games, and the Rare shooters were just awesome to look at. Even early games like Mario 64 and Wave Race seemed like a half-generation ahead of what was being doing on PS1.

 

[jett]

http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7

Absolutely fantastic.

 

[Celine]

Character programmer, Square Japan

I'll say this. I'm impressed with what Nintendo [was] able to do with the 64 hardware. Mario, Zelda — their devs must be top notch to be able to do that. But that's essentially the extent of what you can do with the hardware. And you would get nowhere near anything like a Final Fantasy running on it.

Why not?
Cart space constraint is the only limitation.
From a technical point of view Final Fantasy 7 isn't really that impressive (the combination between polygonal characters and FMV playing on the background was a nice trick but that's it).

Indeed if Square ever wanted (or were ever allowed by Nintendo) to develop a RPG for N64 they would have probably opted for a different graphics style compared to Final Fantasy games on PS1 (2D backgrounds with polygonal characters) due to the cart limitations.
Probably something like Legend of the Mystical Ninja (full 3D) or Fuurai no Shiren 2 (2D characters on 3D backgrounds):

Woah what an impossible feat!

 

[jett]

Why not?

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan
And we'd be running parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you'd have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second. And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]

I mean, it's there in the post you selectively quoted.

Only thing I can say about it is that the Final Fantasy games on PS1 used a lot of special effects during battle, especially when summoning. Based on the quote above, I figure they way they do it just doesn't jive with the capabilities of the N64.

 

[Celine]

I mean, it's there in the post you selectively quoted.

Only thing I can say about it is that the Final Fantasy games on PS1 used a lot of special effects during battle, especially when summoning. Based on the quote above, I figure they way they do it just doesn't jive with the capabilities of the N64.

I still don't see anything that can't be done on N64 on the gifs you posted.
A bunch of scripted real time polygonal cinematics without any gaming logic or psychic calculation behind them.

 

[petran79]

Even the Windows version of FF7 in the late 90s had issues and glitches, despite having 3dfx support. He means probably that N64 would be more demanding compared to PS1. They'd also need to switch FMV with rendered scenes

 

[Ruud_Luiten]

N64 also had the best looking 3d fighter. Mace-The dark age is basicly an arcade perfect port running at a lower resolution. I'm still amazed how they could archive that on the N64 hardware.
Bio Freaks ran and looked surprisingly good too

You haven't played Tekken 3, I see

 

[jett]

I still don't see anything that can't be done on N64 on the gif you posted.
A bunch of scripted real time polygonal cinematics without any gaming logic or psychic calculation behind them.

It may be that they're using a bunch of sprites for the effects, or that in combination with the polycount the N64 just couldn't hack it. After all, their test was about how much polygons and sprites you could display at once, and the PS1 bested the N64. I mean, they never made or attempted to make FF7 for the N64 anyway, they just tested and prototyped. I posted those gifs to show there is more going in the FF games than just two characters on top of a 2D backdrop. Another quote from the same article, in relation to another early N64 test they did:

Yoshinori Kitase
Anyway, we made a 2,000-count polygon version of Behemoth for the Nintendo 64, but when we rendered and animated it, the framerate was way too low. To properly display Behemoth with that technology, we needed 2,000 polygons, but it was a little too much for the hardware. That was part of the problem with choosing Nintendo.

If you think the N64 was better than the PS1 in all regards, you should probably stop thinking that.

 

[Celine]

It may be that they're using a bunch of sprites for the effects, or that in combination with the polycount the N64 just couldn't hack it. After all, their test was about how much polygons and sprites you could display at once, and the PS1 bested the N64. I mean, they never made or attempted to make FF7 for the N64 anyway, they just tested and prototyped. I posted those gifs to show there is more going in the FF games than just two characters on top of a 2D backdrop. Another quote from the same article, in relation to another early N64 test they did:



If you think the N64 was better than the PS1 in all regards, you should probably stop thinking that.

Of course, I think Square employees are sincere.
I still don't think that FF7 battle scenes are out of the realm of N64 capabilities (nor some amazing achievement of the generation).

Both models are composed of about 3000 polygons and appear in the same cutscene.

 

[KojiKnight]

Yeah not enough games used a similar streaming technique on PS1, the long loading times were something that definitely fueled the fanboy wars back in the day :b

I can't find the article right this second, but didn't Naughty Dog talk about how Sony Japan representatives talk about limiting how many reads from the disc can be done? That Crash Bandicoot was using like a factor of 10 times as many as was recommended and SoJ was worried that kind of stress could damage the disc drive?

I imagine most games kept within the recommended maximum reads and that kind of seamless game was rare because of it.

 

[SpinningBirdKick]

The N64 had per pixel Z buffering and texture smoothing but a small texture cache.

The PS1 was a beast with amazing polygon throughput when programmed correctly but this came at a cost. Affine texture mapping and a lack of Z buffer gave PS1 games a 'distinctive' look which wasn't always welcome.

For it's time the PS1 was ground breaking and a joy to work within it's constraints.

 

[KojiKnight]

Yup. Texture warping was horrible because of it, the first Tomb Raider game really shows it, even where the environment clips and doesn't wholly connect. But the advantage at the same time is that you can control the way the draw distance affects visual fidelity and plan your rendering out to decide how you want to go about it. Pre-vis streaming and all that good stuff. Lots of work required though.

I'm not going to lie, I always thought Crash Bandicoot was a much better game than Mario 64 visually and game play wise. This is a personal opinion, not factual. The world in Crash just seems far more fleshed out and thought out whereas Mario 64 felt open but not really that well populated or decorated for all the open space it uses. Plus I hated the way Mario controlled as opposed to Crash, then again, I realise that's personal opinion too. No need to hate ya'll just my 50 cents.

The Crash Bandicoot devs agree with you, to the point that reading their writings on the subject border on obnoxious

 

[AlphaSnake]

As much as I loved the PlayStation (and literally dedicated my professional life to it as a writer), visually the games on the N64 just ran and looked a bit better. Mario, Zelda, Banjo, DK, GoldenEye, WaveRacer, PilotWings, etc.

Soul Reaver did catch up and look amazing towards the end of the system's lifespan, but Nintendo had established its visual dominance with so many incredible looking games by then.

 

[Akzel]

I dont really care about the power between both machine. Maybe it was less beautiful on PS1 but it was still a better console to me since the library was more appealing to me during that time.

 

[PtM]

Ben Heck is an engineer that takes the two apart and analyses them. You'll be surprised. The N64 seemed like everything is a bottle neck. You should watch this video.

https://youtu.be/xT8_Q7KGcoc

Good stuff, thanks.

 

[jett]

Ben Heck is an engineer that takes the two apart and analyses them. You'll be surprised. The N64 seemed like everything is a bottle neck. You should watch this video.

https://youtu.be/xT8_Q7KGcoc

Yeah I thought this video was really interesting.

 

[DonMigs85]

I still dream of a hypothetical N64 that had a 4X CD drive (even if it only used mini-CDs which were like 150MB),8KB texture cache and 8MB RAM from the start.

 

[Schopenhauerian]

Polygon edges wobble because vertex locations are essentially snapped to the pixel grid. "No subpixel precision." Textures further swim/wobble/whatever because the texture projection method on PS1 is crude and inaccurate, it's not "perspective correct."

http://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/pgxp/
...The PSX had no floating point unit installed as COP1 (coprocessor 1), and neither did the GTE [Geometry Transfer Engine] have any float support. It deals mainly in fixed point math, and because of the rotate and translation transformations involved that occur on the GTE side, precision errors will build up and this will result in the ‘wobbling’ effect you can see manifested onscreen...

The N64 had a similar configuration to the PSX, except that the equivalent to GTE was called RSP there – also installed as COP2 (coprocessor 2). Unlike the PSX, though, the N64 also had an FPU installed as COP1 (coprocessor 1). Like the GTE, RSP deals mainly with integer fixed-point math, but unlike the GTE, custom microcode can be uploaded to the RSP, making it more flexible and capable of performing custom tasks programmed by the game developer specifically for the game. In certain games you can see similar wobbling issues (F-Zero X’ vehicles is a good example), but it’s far less severe...

...what made the difference in terms of the N64 having more stable rendering compared to the PSX is the lack of perspective correct texturing, which the N64 does have. Calculating the coordinates so that a texture would look correct from any angle would be computationally expensive... By only applying perspective-correct sample coordinates at certain intervals, rendering could be done much quicker on the PSX, but at the cost of the ‘warping/dancing’ polygons that you can see in so many PSX games. To combat these issues, you’d see developers like Psygnosis using many tricks in games like Wipeout to ‘mask’ these issues (for instance by subdividing textures into many parts)...

PGXP [Parallel/Precision Geometry Transform Pipeline] [for the PCSX-R and Mednafen/Beetle PSX emulators] attempts to kill two birds with one stone. First, it introduces subpixel precision to get rid of the wobbling polygon issues. Second, it adds perspective correct texturing to stop the ‘textue warping/dancing’ issues. iCatButler first started integrating PGXP into the emulator PCSX-R (by injecting it into Pete’s OGL2 plugin, a closed-source plugin)...

I still haven't had a chance to try it out myself, but PGXP seems to work with just about everything:

• Tomb Raider (split-screen, w/ and w/o PGXP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUpCD9Hxe_o
• Vagrant Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBpoFs2FJnE&t=142s
• Silent Hill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X3P1ydXexQ
• R4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKNLwC3sdgg&t=720s
• MGS1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY3nTN0eNnE&t=250s
• Wipeout 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heb08fj7tO0&t=143s
• Einhander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNDFR4nvOJA&t=15s
• Parasite Eve 2 (use of PGXP starts at 0:40): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9OUk63B7d0&t=35s
• Tenchu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oBeO-cui_c

The use of custom microcode on the N64 (as in F-Zero X, mentioned above) was also discussed earlier in the thread:

...Another problem with the N64 was the whole microcode thing. The graphics unit was somewhat programmable (in a very primitive way) and the SDK shipped with SGI's provided microcode that implemented all the basic stuff like vertex transformation and lighting. However, SGI's microcode was designed for accuracy (not performance), was badly documented and Nintendo didn't allow developers to write custom microcode until very late in the system's life, which is when we got actual system-pushers from the likes of Factor 5 and Rare...

Some folks have suggested that Nintendo's stance (“...didn't allow developers to write custom microcode...”) was at least in part due to the fact that Nintendo wanted to preserve a certain contrast with the PSX:

N64 games just felt so solid and had a sense of 3d space ...

The claim is that Nintendo had to be persuaded that other developers would be able to use custom microcode effectively:

...Because what you're missing is that the N64 uses a LOT of hardware power to keep polygons where they should be, while the PS1 uses none because it can't do that. If Fast3d -- that is, the N64 microcode with none of those features -- had been allowed, N64 games would look as inaccurate as PS1 games, with texture warping and polygon popping... Nintendo chose to require better-quality [more stable/solid/accurate] graphics instead... While it is true that a few developers were given the ability to do their own microcode, Nintendo had to really be pushed to allow it, and very, very few third-party studios were ever given the information necessary to do their own microcode. Looking at Boss Games and Factor 5's games shows what you can do with your own microcode, but not many others managed to convince Nintendo to let them try...

 

[Italia64]

I just want to remember that not even one PS1 game pushed many polygons per second as WDC, Battle for Naboo, Perfect Dark, 007 TWINE, Rush 2049, NFL QB Club 2000,F-Zero X, etc.

It's a false myth that N64 can't push more polys than PS.

Not only some N64 game pushed triple polys than the most polys intense PS games, bit them also did it with perspective correction, AA and filterings. N64 pushed more polys and higher quality polys too.

 

[Version 3.0]

I just want to remember that not even one PS1 game pushed many polygons per second as WDC, Battle for Naboo, Perfect Dark, 007 TWINE, Rush 2049, NFL QB Club 2000,F-Zero X, etc.

It's a false myth that N64 can't push more polys than PS.

Not only some N64 game pushed triple polys than the most polys intense PS games, bit them also did it with perspective correction, AA and filterings. N64 pushed more polys and higher quality polys too.

Source? The official specs are 360k/s for Playstation and 100k/s for N64. My understanding is that N64 got closer in reality to its spec than PS1 did, but PS1 still had a higher raw count.