Why the Nintendo 64's Graphics Were So Blurry

did you ever see something as a child that you found so weird and so bizarre that when you think back on it later in life you find yourself asking whether it was real or just a memory of a fever dream you had I can think of one thing that fits that description at some point during the '90s I distinctly recall watching a commercial for the Sega Saturn which had people representing the various organs of the body who were in a panic for some reason and at one point someone received a call from the sphincter who was demanding to know what was going on well after a brief search on the internet I discovered that the commercial was indeed real and not a fever dream it's called the theater of the eye and it's every bit as bizarre and surreal as I remember urg ATS online to it's the sphincter what is going on up there man the '90s were weird weren't they and the console Wars between Sega and Nintendo were no exception in the latter half of the decade however Sony replaced Sega as Nintendo's main rival and the battle between the two played out across countless schoolyards the N64 is going to kick Sony's ass it's 64 bits which is twice as many bits as the PlayStation and that means it's twice as good oh yeah then how come the N64 has no games sure Mario 64 might be good but what else do you have pilot wings that's a tech demo is quality over quantity [ __ ] most PlayStation games are silly and boring the president of Nintendo even said it himself quality what kind of quality are you talking about superman64 but even the good games on the N64 look like they're made for babies PlayStation has games made for mature adults like Tomb Raider and Twisted Metal so being darker doesn't mean it's better face it loser all the good third party developers have come over to my side because they don't want to have to work with a cartridge based system look at your game game Library just a bunch of crappy arcade ports and rehashes of Super Nintendo games we got fighting games like soulcaliber and tane what do you have War cards biof freaks don't make me laugh and RPGs do you even have any RPGs on that pathetic excuse for a console cuz I got three words for you Final Fantasy 7 Final Fantasy just stupid this stupid little guy just stupid sword you stupid spiky hair it it it it the Nintendo 64 or Ultra 64 as it was initially called arrived amidst a Vortex of hype to develop the console Nintendo had partnered with silicon Graphics incorporated or SGI who specialized in high performance workstations for 3D Graphics SGI machines have been used to create the visuals in movies such as Jurassic Park and Toy Story as well as video games like Donkey Kong Country so you can imagine that the expectations for the Nintendo 6 64 were pretty damn high and while the N64 was technically superior to the PlayStation in nearly every way that did not mean that its visuals lacked for critics in particular reviewers often described N64 games as being overly blurry n distinctly recall one magazine likening the consol's graphics to someone having smeared Vaseline all over the television sure part of it had to do with the fact that we were playing them with CRT televisions which lacked the Pixel Perfect sharpness of digital displays but the same is true of all the other consoles at the time the blame usually fell on Nintendo's decision to use cartridges instead of CD ROMs which drastically reduced the amount of storage space available to developers but in reality the problem was the result of several factors none of which had much to do with cartridges perhaps the biggest cause of blurriness was the low resolution most games ran at the N64 could theoretically render up to a resolution of 640x480 but very few games actually use this even ones that ran in a high resolution mode not only did it incur a significant performance cost but also decrease the amount of memory available to programmers you see during the rendering process the current frame being drawn is held in an area of ram known as the frame buffer and higher resolutions meant a larger frame buffer taking up more memory this was a problem on the N64 as it had just 4 megab of ram which was shared among all components hence why games that Ed high resolution modes often required the N64 expansion pack which doubled the n64's memory from 4 MB to 8 the majority of developers opted for a resolution of 320x 240 for comparison HD resolution is 1920x 1080 and 4K or Ultra HD is 3840 by 2160 at this resolution an obvious problem presents itself which is heavy pixelization lines that should be straight and curves that should be smooth instead have a blocky staircas likee appearance this effect is called aliasing and to help reduce it we therefore need some kind of anti-aliasing the N64 Hardware featured fulls screen anti-aliasing a rather remarkable achievement for a mid99s game console and the way it worked was relatively simple each pixel is divided into a 4x4 sub pixel grid the GPU then examines eight of these pixels and counts how many are covered by the edge of the polygon that pixel belongs to a value of eight indicates that the entire pixel was covered by the polygon and a value of one indicates that only one sub pixel was covered this coverage value is then used to determine how much of that pixel should be blended with a pixel of the adjacent polygon and the result is that Jagged edges get smoothed out you can clearly see it here in Golden ey7 notice how the black edge of the rifle scope is smoothly blended with the white snow on the ground making the transition between these two objects a little less harsh in addition to the an an aliasing filter the N64 also applied a horizontal blur to the final image effectively doubling the horizontal resolution presumably to improve pixel blending on CRT televisions when combined these two filters created a much smoother image at the cost of making it substantially blurrier here is Super Mario 64 with anti-aliasing and the horizontal blur applied and here it is with both filters turned off I'll leave it up to you to decide which one looks better unfortunately most N64 games did not allow the player to disable these features with a few exceptions Midway Port of it software's Quake gave you the option of enabling or disabling anti-aliasing using the filter menu option although the horizontal blur remained in effect the port of Quake 2 in addition to being one of the few N64 games with an honest to God loading screen has no filtering applied whatsoever the other major source of the n64's blurry Graphics is its textures a texture map is just a 2D image applied to 3D objects and a major issue with texture mapping is that when the camera moves close to an object surface the individual pixels that make up the texture or texels as they are called become very obvious resulting in a blocky pixelated appearance a solution is texture filtering where the transition between individual texels is smoothed out so pixelization never occurs the trade-off is that instead of pixelization you get blurriness and the lower resolution the textures are the worse the blurriness gets and N64 games tended to use a very low resolution textures most of the textures in Super Mario 64 for example have a resolution of 32x 32 pixels when viewed up close the texture filtering algorithm reduces them to these great blurry smears of colors and here is where the n64's much maligned cartridge format usually gets the blame the argument goes that because cartridges have such a limited capacity compared to CD ROMs developers were forced to use lower resolution textures and perhaps this is true to an extent but a much likelier culprit is the texture cache on the n64's reality display processor which handled texture mapping this cache was called TM and it was just 4 kiloby in size meaning that no texture could be larger than that and if every texture were that size then they would have to go through one after the other which would drastically slow down rendering as an aside one unique characteristic of N64 Graphics is that textures often had this hexagonal pattern to them reminiscent of the rupes from The Legend of Zelda texture filtering is typically accomplished by four point sampling that is sampling the color of one Texel along with the three adjacent texels in order to create a smooth transition between them however the N64 used what was called three-point sampling where only three texels were sampled creating the distinctive hexagonal pattern when I played night dive Studios re-release of Doom 64 I was surprised to see that the developers had recreated this form of texture filtering and the fact that I noticed this should give you an idea of what kind of hopeless individual I am as for why the N64 had such a small texture cache and why it used three-point filtering instead of fourpoint well the answer is simple to keep costs down the console retailed for $199 which if adjusted for inflation is about $400 today and you aren't going to reach that price point without cutting a few Corners which explains why unlike the SNES the console sold with no game and only one controller our family wasn't rich but we were affluent enough that our second controller was an official Nintendo one I might not have been popular in grade school but at least I wasn't the kid who made his friends use a mad cats controller and now is the part where I reveal my true motivations for making this video you see the reason that I still vividly recall critics complaining about the blurriness of the N64 Graphics is that for me this was the first time that Nintendo came in for criticism growing up in the '90s the folks at Nintendo were nothing nothing less than the gods of video games immutable and infallible in those days the company was led by Hiroshi yuchi and everything I had read about the man told me that he was someone who was both feared and respected a veritable dimeo of capitalism whose first act upon taking control of the company in 1949 had been to fire everyone who might oppose him he was a seventh Don Master of the game go whose playing style was according to Next Generation magazine forc ful aggressive open flexible in defense and Unstoppable in the face of weakness well I thought with someone like that at the helm surely Nintendo will put this upstart Sony in their place right when magazines like next Generation made what were in retrospect completely valid criticisms of the N64 I dismissed them as simply being biased and having some sort of anti Nintendo agenda but the PlayStation would leave its competition in the dust and when the Sixth Gen eration of consoles rolled around Sony's lead would only increase with the PlayStation 2 becoming the bestselling console of all time for better or worse Nintendo has never played by anyone's Rules by their own and they would find greater success when they stopped trying to compete on their opponent's terms pushing the limits of graphical Hardware was no longer their priority and systems such as the Wii and the switch were notably underpowered compared to their Rivals and while this proved to be a great success for the company it's interesting to look back at a time when intendo wanted to be at The Cutting Edge the N64 has several design decisions that were questionable in hindsight and it's easy to write them off as a result of arrogance or being out of touch but this was the industry's first forray into 3D capable consoles and when you're breaking you ground some missteps are inevitable and for some of us this era of consoles reminds us of a time when our greatest concern in the world was Nintendo versus Sony when we had playground slap fights over which system had the better games and speaking of which as someone who has never owned a PlayStation of any generation maybe I should sit down and finally play Final Fantasy 7 one of these days but that's for another video thanks for watching everyone

Channel: NonEssentialFungus

Views: 605

Keywords: nintendo 64 graphics, nintendo 64 blurry, nintendo 64 blurriness, n64, nintendo 64, n64 graphics, nintendo, nonessential

Id: 5DJig8WgOMY

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2024