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Man the PS1 texture warping in retrospect was rough.
- Thread starter ItWasMeantToBe19
- Start date
"Affine" transforms are basically what SNES folks refer to as "mode 7", and which I've sometimes seen as "things you can do with a piece of thick cardboard". You can rotate it around (rotation), you can zoom it in and out (scaling), you can mirror it (reflection), and you can even hold it at an angle (skew). (And of course you can move it from side to side (translation), but most 2D systems support that so it's not very interesting.) And of course you can do all or most of this at once. For doing a 3D representation of a single texture, it's usually enough, and Sega's Super Scaler and similar hardware was doing this for a decade or so before the PS1 was a thing. Indeed, it's also what the Saturn's main method of 3D representation was, but for square images like bitmaps instead of triangles; Saturn didn't have texture mapping so much as it manipulated the shape of the textures themselves. Using quads instead of triangles meant that some objects tended to not have these issues of texture warping to the same degree on the Saturn, but it also meant that Saturn games had issues when either trying to represent games made for the PS1, or for stuff where the models weren't made around squares.
In effect, you're representing 3D spaces by doing a few different 2D operations, and most of the time (and especially for simpler textures) this works well enough, and because it's fast and doesn't require as much math was one of the reasons the PS1 had a competitive price to the N64 and still could push more detailed textures and fairly elaborate geometry.
While the basic idea for how PS1 rendered its polygons is that it would scale them, then shear (skew) them, the N64's calculations effectively did both at once in scaling by the z-coordinate, which meant that texture perspective was retained. This was how 3D rendering (rarely expected to be done in real-time) was done as a standard by that point. It was genuinely very expensive -- the GPU on the N64 was based on the Silicon Graphics workstations of the time, but while those were extremely powerful state-of-the-art machines, they were also priced in the tens of thousands of dollars at the time. Trying to get that tech into something consumer-spec'd meant major compromises, and so a lot of N64 games had relatively choppy frame rates, and the texture memory was compromised as well.
You can do this yourself with the pieces of the triangle in most image manipulation tools by selecting the region, resizing, and then skewing. That's why I think it's useful to think of affine transforms as something being done to the texture as a whole, rather than something being done to the polygon before the texture is applied to it. Similarly, the more triangles you have to split up the object you're texturing, the less shearing has to be done to each triangle, and thus the less egregious the warping winds up being.
And as you may have surmised, if an emulator replaces the scaling logic with the formula used in the N64's polygon calculation, you can get a PS1 that produces perspective-correct texturing. It is more expensive but without question a feasible change on modern hardware, as it's what GPUs have been designed to do for a while now.
I love this aesthetic. Honestly, i think- much like pixel art- the ambiguity and weirdness in low resolution graphics allow your brain to fill in a lot of details. If this was HD, I'd be super put off by how static and perfectly geometrical everything would look. The warping just makes it feel more alive.
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Subpixel precision is one of those things in graphics which is incredibly obvious in hindsight, yet something we missed for a long time.
Seeing the difference for a first time is one of my favorite moments from those times.
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Tomb raider 1 on the ps1 is probably the worst offender, since most of the game takes place in caves and interiors the entire screen is filled with these hideous constantly shifting textures, it's honestly kinda hard to look at.
And it doesn't really help that the framerate is around 15-20 with constant fluctuations, that's another thing about early 3d games that we tend to forget, a lot of them ran like shit (not all), even worse than the average console game today, today developers at least target a minimum of 30 (with varied success), that was not the case with early 3d games, there was no standard so there are plenty of games around the 15-20 mark.
And it doesn't really help that the framerate is around 15-20 with constant fluctuations, that's another thing about early 3d games that we tend to forget, a lot of them ran like shit (not all), even worse than the average console game today, today developers at least target a minimum of 30 (with varied success), that was not the case with early 3d games, there was no standard so there are plenty of games around the 15-20 mark.
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Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Philips CD-i and the like are all much worse in this regard.
What I'm saying, though, is that there are loads of gorgeous 2D games on PlayStation - some of the best pixel art ever created exists on that platform. It's gorgeous.
There's plenty of great looking 3D games too, though - fighting games, shmups and the like all hold up really well and tend to run at 60fps.
You look back at the 3DO or something and the average frame-rate is like 12fps and there are literally two games that run at 60 on that machine. I love 3DO but it's aged much worse.
The issues with PS1 tend to become evident when you have a 3D camera that moves in close proximity to a surface. If the camera is close to a surface, the affine warping becomes super apparent and it looks awful.
Unfortunately it's what makes the PS1 age poorly. I have no nostalgia for this shit.
You can correct this up to a certain degree in emulators now
You can correct this up to a certain degree in emulators now
You do realiseI love this shit. Sure, some of it is nostalgia but I loved the effect. RE spiders were enhanced by it.
You do realise that this still gives people nightmares.
Like the biggest difference between how PS1 did transforms for 3D effect and how the Saturn did is that the PS1 allowed you to specify texture starting coordinates fairly arbitrarily, which meant that you could have things like environment mapping on PS1 but doing the same thing on the Saturn was not possible except with software renders -- because, again, the Saturn was effectively manipulating the textures directly, not doing any sort of mapping onto polygons as we'd think of it. Jon Burton of TT has a pretty accessible rundown of what that means in practice:
Yes, and?
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Yes, and?
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Yeah this is probably the real answer, me and a couple of friends had a boozy jaguar night before christmas, tempest 2000 was the only game that held up well, alien vs predator was a lot worse than i remembered it.
Like the biggest difference between how PS1 did transforms for 3D effect and how the Saturn did is that the PS1 allowed you to specify texture starting coordinates fairly arbitrarily, which meant that you could have things like environment mapping on PS1 but doing the same thing on the Saturn was not possible except with software renders -- because, again, the Saturn was effectively manipulating the textures directly, not doing any sort of mapping onto polygons as we'd think of it. Jon Burton of TT has a pretty accessible rundown of what that means in practice:
Yes, and?
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. . .
Yeah, not only does the Jaguar not have quite the level of power the PS1 does, since it's basically just a marginally beefier 32X, it also does everything in software (like, again, the 32X) so it's effectively impossible to correct its issues in emulation the way that you can PS1 texture mapping.
(Of course the corollary here might be that the 32X aged worse than the Jaguar, but at least the 32X got some pretty good games even if the vast majority of them have since received superior re-releases on newer hardware. We've got ports of Virtua Racing, but what can be said of Checkered Flag?? or, god help us all, club drive)
It did bug me generally as someone who played more N64 at the time. While textures weren't the greatest on the N64, the textures at least stayed put. Texture crawls on walls in PSX games bugged me more generally.
PlayStation was great in terms of pre-rendered graphics, FMVs, CD quality sound, music, and voices, but I think N64 handled polygons better, though there were some PlayStatation games that managed to get around that.
They just look rougher now becuase they were all initially played on CRT screens. HD really doesn't do any favors unless remastered or re-rendered for HD displays.
PlayStation was great in terms of pre-rendered graphics, FMVs, CD quality sound, music, and voices, but I think N64 handled polygons better, though there were some PlayStatation games that managed to get around that.
They just look rougher now becuase they were all initially played on CRT screens. HD really doesn't do any favors unless remastered or re-rendered for HD displays.
"Can you remember when did you first started having these thoughts about warping textures?"
lmao!
It took me over a decade to figure out that this is why I thought N64 games looked better. I couldn't put my finger on what it was.
Honestly, when you consider that most later games subdivided their geometry to try and mitigate the effect, and that games ran at around 256×224-ish on a CRT, I honestly don't think the texture warping and polygon jitter was that bad. Blow the same games up to HD resolution with the same integer vertex transformations happening and the same amount of polygon geometry and sure it looks a whole lot worse, but that's not what people saw at the time.
I largely agree, but unfortunately the problem sometimes extended beyond the original console and into PC ports that ran at 640x480 or higher. Some PS1 to PC ports followed the PS1 games too closely and seemed to include the sub-pixel inaccuracy, leading to wobbly looking polygons in motion. Resident Evil 3, I'm looking at you.
Higher resolutions makes it worse but it was still very noticeable even running on a ctr,i clearly remember seeing tomb raider for the first time and thinking "wow this looks amazing but why is everything shifting around you as you move?"
Yeah, some games didn't look to great, but I think games like Spyro and Crash hold up really well if only because of the crazy amount of polygon subdivision going on, this video shows it pretty well:
When combined with CRTs which were the display of the time, all of these look far smoother as CRT has a small softening effect on its imagery. So on what at the time were highly detailed models like characters it generally worked and a little texture warping seemed natural as these were clothes and skin, but on architecture it did look pretty awful.
I never really noticed it until i started playing racing games. It was super obvious whenever you went through a tunnel or got close to a wall and if it was textured, it would "dance" around because of the speed you were moving at in racers was usually far faster than most games would require of you so that warping effect wasnt as in your face but it was there. GT ruined me though once I saw it there, i started seeing it everywhere.
Wow, it even gets the vertex snapping down.
Whatever you do, don't turn mouselook on.
Not quite. Texture warping was caused by the lack of perspective correction when drawn. Essentially textures can only be transformed to fit their respective triangles using 2D functions only (known as affine transformation) which of course looks wrong if your trying to draw a surface at an angle to the camera's perspective. In order to perspective correct the texture, you need to be able to divide each pixel by their repsective z value, which is the PS1 couldn't do because it's GPU did not store z-values after rasterisation (plus it would have been to slow anyway, division is very expensive). Typically devs tried to minimise texture warping by subdividing polygons close to the camera but the PS1 could only draw so many triangles so there was a limit to what they could do.
The lack of FP precision was responsible for the jittery vertex movement and the occasional visible seams between polygons, both of which were also really ugly. The later could be somewhat resolved by drawing the polygon edges overlapping but there was nothing that could be done about the former.
Me too. I love the way MGS characters wiggle constantly
I don't remember caring much about at the time, but undoubtedly that was an era of extreme limitations when it came to 3d graphics
I still hate affine texture warping, but point sampling is something I've gained a bit of an appreciation for over the years. Back in the day I would have always taken filtered textures, but with PS1 era games with horribly small textures I think the unfiltered look can give an impression of detail that's wiped out when filtered. PS1 ports to the PC almost always added texture filtering, but nowadays I really don't think that filtering very low res textures that weren't meant to be filtered works all that well. Hell, in some cases I don't think filtering on old games designed exclusively for the PC looks all that good (Quake 2's enemies being a good example).
correct. Even at the time I thought the look of a lot of PS1 games was rough because of that warping. It made simple Dreamcast ports of games like Tony Hawk 1 look incredible by comparison.
It's the reason I didn't buy a PSX.
However the PS2 with the texture smoothing option was great! I bought the PS2 right at launch and played a bunch of games I missed like Chrono Cross, FFIX, Valkyrie Profile, FF Tactics, Silent Hills, and Castlevania. Basically stuff that didn't get an N64 or PC port.
Tried playing and I couldn't. Also got a bit of anxiety because I didn't understand what was happening to my brain lol don't link that again. Also Alt+F4'd my browser and cleared my history.
I had a N64 in eight grade and played on a PlayStation 1 like 1 year after I beat Ocarina.
It looked terrible to me. I knew that pixelation was probably the same as in PC (N64 being "hardware accelerated" like...PCs with Voodoo graphic cards, and PS1 being in "software mode").
Yet I did not comprehend the warping. I remember thinking that it could be on "purpose, but why?".
I later played much more games on the PS1 than on the N64, but I always saw the blemishes in IQ.
N64 was blurry but the worlds were consistent.
Oof
Reminds me of a weird glitch that happened to me while playing Everquest one time. It was like all the textures just got unglued from where they were supposed to be, and flowed around as I moved the camera. Never was able to figure out what caused it, and I've never seen anything like it again
