Is DOOM 64 the best looking N64 game?

[Kinsie]

On 6/20/2023 at 2:18 PM, TasAcri said:

And how DOOM 64 looks like:

 

 

Here's how it actually looked on the original NTSC ROM on the default settings.

 

[TasAcri]

Well, you didn't have to use the default settings though.

[Cutman 999]

7 hours ago, TasAcri said:

 

They didn't "have" to do this sacrifice, it was a choice. There are great looking N64 games that run at stable 30fps and look better than the majority of poor running games on the console at the same time.

Consider that the n64 has a very limited texture cache of 4kb; extremely inferior to the standard at the time and hurtled texture quality by a long fucking shot, janky rdram which was slow to load/reload things from (You remember the "stop and swap" shit, well from this crippling limitation comes from) and also nintendo itself propietarized their fucking rendering algoriths; so devs with basically little to no documentation have to work with what it was basically a super computer, is the main reason (Not to mention that texture filtering and native antialiasing where things really heavy to render at the mid 90's) why the ps1, a much inferior console, has games that run much more consistently compared to the n64. 

 

Even first party games don't run consistently like motherfucking ocarina of time because nintendo didn't know how to use the hardware.

 

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by Cutman 999

[TasAcri]

25 minutes ago, Cutman 999 said:

nintendo didn't know how to use the hardware.

 

But RARE knew. With Banjo Kazooie they proved the console could do everything people hoped it could. It looked great and run smoothly enough. They also got around the texture cache bottleneck and the result is the texturing in this game is bonkers, in some specific areas it felt like tech-demo quality, as if like they were flexing.

 

https://kbrecordzz.com/2022/12/17/banjokazooie/

 

So they made this game but after that they decided to push the graphics even further, killing performance. There was nothing wrong with how BK looked, there would be no problem if DK64, or Jet Force Gemini, or Banjo-Tooie or Conker had the same graphical quality and complexity. But they made those game too demanding for the N64 or for their ability to optimize them enough so they run smoothly. They knew this, they tested these games. That was their choice.

 

Also, what was that about Ocarina of Time? I mean, the game runs at 20 fps but it's pretty consistent.

[Dragonsbrethren]

TWINE is an interesting case. It actually looks better on inaccurate emulators than on hardware. I'm hardly an expert, but from what I've been told, Eurocom didn't really optimize the game's assets for the hardware. The textures are incredible quality for the N64, 64x64 colored textures are all but unheard of, but for whatever reason, the level designers didn't apply them to surfaces at the correct scale, so they are always rendered mipmapped on hardware. They still look surprisingly good regardless, but the game could've actually looked a lot better! The engine also disables the N64's antialiasing, which is why it's so jagged looking compared to nearly every other N64 game. And those loading screens don't actually need to exist at all!

 

It's also a sore spot for me because my dumb ass wanted the next Bond game and bought it instead of Perfect Dark, knowing full well it had a different developer. I didn't like the sci-fi aliens approach PD was taking...but it played so much better. TWINE was...passable and did a lot of cool things, but PD was the true sequel to GoldenEye.

Edited October 21, 2023 by Dragonsbrethren

[Rudolph]

Speaking of TWINE, I was shocked to hear that there was also a Playstation 1 version, which was not a port, but a completely different game.

Edited October 21, 2023 by Rudolph