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Man the PS1 texture warping in retrospect was rough.

ItWasMeantToBe19

ItWasMeantToBe19

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Oct 26, 2017
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PS1 texture warping (due to a lack of floating point precision I believe?) caused walls to really jitter and shake and it is... a really nauseating effect.

Fixed perspective games like Crash and Final Fantasy seemed to have less of this from what I remember, but games where you could come close to the wall and the camera could move in a bunch of ways just look so rough now.

Kind of really glad for the remaster of Spyro and I hope Ape Escape 4 comes soon so I don't have to go back to play the PS1 game to satisfy my Ape Escape desire (don't own the PS2 games).
 
Bjones

Bjones

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Oct 30, 2017
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Nah it actually helped it a lot. It gave an illusion of more going on than there actually was.
 
ghibli99

ghibli99

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Oct 27, 2017
17,994
Didn't this get fixed/addressed in later cycle PS1 games? Or maybe I'm thinking about how they got better with broken seams/stretching polygons (which I first noticed getting way better in the first Spyro).
 

Deleted member 21709

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Oct 28, 2017
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I'm not really bothered by it. But it varies from game to game. I prefer this to the blurry N64 games.
 
Kouriozan

Kouriozan

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Oct 25, 2017
21,228
It looked fine on old small CRT but yeah, nowaday it's just awful.
PS1 is probably the console that aged the worse.
 
Combichristoffersen

Combichristoffersen

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Oct 27, 2017
12,756
Doesn't look great, but if I had to choose between PS1 texture warping and N64 vaseline smear, I'd take texture warping any day. Consoles/games from that gen haven't aged gracefully.
 
lazygecko

lazygecko

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Oct 25, 2017
3,628
Doesn't really look that bad in the footage you posted. It's at its worst when emualated at higher rendering resolutions. The actual PS1 resolution helped mitigate and hide the inherent jittering a great deal.

The effect is also exacerbated by the distance between each polygon vertice, which is probably why you notice it more when viewing surfaces up close. Games had to avoid expansive world design like large open terrain that other systems like N64 and PC could handle easier.
 
TheWooniestWoona

TheWooniestWoona

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Oct 27, 2017
5,880
Later games got far better at hiding it, but yeah, it sucked.

I don't really mind it too much, but I love that modern emulators can fix it. I actually love how PS1 games look for the most part, but the texture warping was never really a desired part of the art style of games.
 
AmirMoosavi

AmirMoosavi

Member
Dec 10, 2018
2,037
Jaded Alyx said:
"in retrospect"

It was always bad
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Combichristoffersen said:
Doesn't look great, but if I had to choose between PS1 texture warping and N64 vaseline smear, I'd take texture warping any day. Consoles/games from that gen haven't aged gracefully.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yup, I physically got sick the first time I played a PS1 game and couldn't get over the blur on the N64. Seeing Sonic Adventure running on a Dreamcast in Toys R Us was a gamechanger; it looked so crisp and clean in comparison.
 

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thats one of the reasons why i always preferred the n64 back then
 
DJ_Lae

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Oct 27, 2017
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It was always bad. Probably the main reason I spent most of my time back then gaming on PC with a 3d accelerator.

3D stuff on the PS1 was all chunky and wobbly and painful to look at, like the system gave everything a drunk filter.
 

Deleted member 21709

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AmirMoosavi said:
Yup, I physically got sick the first time I played a PS1 game and couldn't get over the blur on the N64. Seeing Sonic Adventure running on a Dreamcast in Toys R Us was a gamechanger; it looked so crisp and clean in comparison.
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Using a VGA Box with Dreamcast brought the IQ to another level entirely. I miss my Dreamcast!

Saturn had good IQ as well, and I loved the extra high resolution 2D/static screens that the Saturn allowed.
 

Dark1x

Digital Foundry
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Oct 26, 2017
3,530
Kouriozan said:
It looked fine on old small CRT but yeah, nowaday it's just awful.
PS1 is probably the console that aged the worse.
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Nah, not even close.

It comes down to game selection. There's a lot of gorgeous PS1 games that still hold up very well. Mostly 2D but plenty of 3D as well. Games that tried to present a 3D world to explore, though, do look very rough.
 
lightchris

lightchris

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Oct 27, 2017
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Dussck said:
Was it the texture that warped or actually the whole geometry?
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It was actually both. Texture warping due to lack of perspective correction and polygon jitter due to lack of subpixel precision/low precision fixed point math.

If it was only one of these problems, I might prefer PS1 graphics over N64 graphics. But the combination is pretty awful and to my tastes worse than just blurry textures.
 

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ghibli99 said:
Didn't this get fixed/addressed in later cycle PS1 games? Or maybe I'm thinking about how they got better with broken seams/stretching polygons (which I first noticed getting way better in the first Spyro).
Click to expand...
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Actually they did tend to compensate for this in addition to the issues you describe. The basic idea of how they fixed the texture warping was to split up polygons closer to the camera in order to minimize the error caused by these precision issues. Like, it's not just the way that the textures are being mapped to the polygons, it's first about the way that they polygons themselves are skewed, which causes what would otherwise be reasonable texturing-math for the resolution to get distorted based on angle. When you break up the polygons into smaller ones, that distortion becomes less pronounced.

Of course modern PS1 emulators also fix the underlying math causing these errors -- because the texturing operations are relatively valid but the polygon skewing isn't, fixing the polygon skewing to be perspective-correct tends to fix most of the errors with texture rendering as well. The rest can be helped by adding some antialiasing or just boosting the rendering resolution.

EDIT: here's a good example of how that worked. The many smaller triangles do a much better job of preserving perspective:
subdivision_sample.jpg
 

Deleted member 12129

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Oct 27, 2017
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At the time I didn't notice it much and just thought it was a normal thing in some games. Then years later when I went back to some PS1 games I thought the warping was emulation errors!

There's a setting in some PS1 emulators now that completely fix the warping by the way. I played through Silent Hill a few months ago and it looked great.
 
modoversus

modoversus

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Oct 25, 2017
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México
I was just thinking about that when watching this video of a homebrew 3D engine for the Saturn, which does not display that texture warping at all.



To be fair I have played very little 3D games on the Saturn, since I mostly have it for the 2D stuff to notice if this is with all 3D games or only some.
 
fontguy

fontguy

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Oct 8, 2018
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I really like it in really small doses. Getting close to walls that didn't weren't divided into a larger number of polygons is pretty awful though.
 
Mars People

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I think the N64 aged way worse than the PS1. Everything looks like a smudgy mess.

Although again apparently emulators can correct this.
 
Blackpuppy

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Oct 28, 2017
4,239
muteKi said:
Actually they did tend to compensate for this in addition to the issues you describe. The basic idea of how they fixed the texture warping was to split up polygons closer to the camera in order to minimize the error caused by these precision issues. Like, it's not just the way that the textures are being mapped to the polygons, it's first about the way that they polygons themselves are skewed, which causes what would otherwise be reasonable texturing-math for the resolution to get distorted based on angle. When you break up the polygons into smaller ones, that distortion becomes less pronounced.

Of course modern PS1 emulators also fix the underlying math causing these errors -- because the texturing operations are relatively valid but the polygon skewing isn't, fixing the polygon skewing to be perspective-correct tends to fix most of the errors with texture rendering as well. The rest can be helped by adding some antialiasing or just boosting the rendering resolution.

EDIT: here's a good example of how that worked. The many smaller triangles do a much better job of preserving perspective:
subdivision_sample.jpg
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

So I know that PS1 uses affine texture mapping and that's what causes that distinctive PS1 wobble and that devs would break up their geometry into smaller and smaller triangles.... but what is affine texture mapping exactly?
 
LuigiMario

LuigiMario

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Oct 28, 2017
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It's rough in some games, but uhhh Ape Escape still looks pretty alright to me? Probably the best looking PS1 open exploration 3D games honestly.
 
KrillinLikeAVillan

KrillinLikeAVillan

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Nov 8, 2017
6,340
Stockholm, Sweden
Yeah it always bugged the hell out of me, it was actually part of what made me interested in the technical side of games, i wanted to know why it made otherwise good looking games look so awful, it wasn't easy finding information about this in 1996 but i somehow managed to find my answer after a ton of effort.

I have a hard time going back to old ps1 games because of it (that and early 3d games are pretty damn rough) luckily there are emulators that fix this pretty nicely.

Kouriozan said:
PS1 is probably the console that aged the worse.
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Yeah i'm kinda with you there, i used to prefer how ps1 games looked compared to n64 but i find myself really not liking how most ps1 games look now, there is a case to be made for the saturn aging worse but that thing was a 2d beast with 2d games that still hold up well today.
 
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MP!

MP!

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Oct 30, 2017
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ItWasMeantToBe19 said:


PS1 texture warping (due to a lack of floating point precision I believe?) caused walls to really jitter and shake and it is... a really nauseating effect.

Fixed perspective games like Crash and Final Fantasy seemed to have less of this from what I remember, but games where you could come close to the wall and the camera could move in a bunch of ways just look so rough now.

Kind of really glad for the remaster of Spyro and I hope Ape Escape 4 comes soon so I don't have to go back to play the PS1 game to satisfy my Ape Escape desire (don't own the PS2 games).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It was bad back then too... I hated it so much back in the day... I've softened on it mostly due to nostalgia but I remember thinking it looked awful in most cases...
 
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