Why PlayStation 1 Graphics Warped and Wobbled so much | MVG
Modern Vintage Gamer1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2020–2022
explainer · general · evergreen · 2020–2022 on HN
Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.
Used as the accessible explanation of PS1 rendering quirks whenever retro 3D graphics or PS1-style renderers come up.
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5 comments from Hacker News
On the same note, I discovered this[1] yesterday. An explanation of why things looked a warped in PS1 games. The explanation actually blew my mind. I had heard the term zbuffer before but didn't really know what it did. [1] ▶ this video
> The texture popping of the PS1 I could never make sense of but it became an aesthetic of the era. The Truth About PS1 Graphics link Why PlayStation 1 Graphics Warped and Wobbled so much ▶ this video
> After all, could you really, badly, critic a 30’s movie because it is not shoot in HD? 1930s films did "shoot in HD". Most films were either 16mm or 35mm, both of which have more than enough fidelity to represent video at 1080p or higher without loss of quality. Here's a copy of Wizard of Oz on 4K UHD: link A more realistic take is could you criticize 1920s films for not shooting with sound, and the answer is yes, absolutely. Films went from almost entirely silent to almost entirely talkies in roughly 3 years because of massive, unprecedented, and immediate commercial pressure to do so. Audiences ate up even mediocre talkies and shunned silent works now considered classics. The only reason colour film adoption wasn't similarly fast was because of Technicolor's monopoly. Flash forward to the 1990s, where cinema as a medium was very sophisticated. Now look at blockbusters beginning to use CG rather than animatronics. The airplane in Air Force One. Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace. Hell, take the 1997 re-releases of the Star Wars trilogy which inexplicably added garbage like CG Jabba the Hutt. The purple stuff in The Langoliers. Even going back to Lord of the Rings, even going back to the Hobbit, even going back to "early" Marvel films there are tons of moments where CG is jarring. The Polar Express -- an excellent and heartwarming Zemeckis film -- is mostly known because no one likes the dead-eye CG. Yes, absolutely, technical barriers have affected peoples enjoyment of film
The PlayStation didn't have perspective-correct texture mapping despite having a real 3D rendering pipeline: ▶ this video
It seems so. A recent video about the graphical quirks of the PlayStation: Why PlayStation 1 Graphics Warped and Wobbled so much ▶ this video