They hold up pretty well when you play them as they were originally supposed to: on a CRT if you can or using emulators' CRT filters if you can't. Trying to play them at very high resolutions on crisp LCD displays is the worst way to go IMO.
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It's interesting how different it is from the N64, which was seemingly designed to produce perfectly correct pixels even though no player would own displays that could really show the difference. I guess that's what you get when you let SGI design the GPU.
It probably had to do more with the evolution of chipset manufacturing and transistor counts (and costs).
The ps1 was released 1.5 years before the N64, the 3dfx voodoo chip is as capable as the n64 (maybe more so considering memory available), but I guess both Nintendo and Sony did opt for a bit more cost-efficient designs to make a profit on their consoles.
Looking at the release dates, the progression of capability is quite matched.
1994 dec 3 ps1 1995 nov 6 3dfx voodoo 1996 jun 23 n64 1998 nov 27 dc 2000 mar 4 ps2
Yeah, any 8/16-bit pixel are t wasn't made to be viewed on a screen with that high a resolution. CRTs smoosh/blur the image a bit so you don't see all the hardlines.
The PS1 didn't even have perpsective corrected texture mapping, some titles handled that manually to make it look less shit but not all titles did so.
The evolution of graphics was brutal in the 90s and early 00s, but somewhere around the PS3's appearance it slowed down since lighting models were becoming "good enough" on the PS3 for not being annoyingly bad and asset creation costs became the limiting factor rather than hardware.
John Carmack once said something like, if you cannot get your game out with the vision you want on a PS3/360 then you are doing something wrong.
That isnt to say that technology hasn't improved (duh!) Just that at that point there was enough grunt and memory that you could approximate what you want without massive compromise.
I still think this is true. But we will take the extra capabilities while we are here.
I own a CRT and several playstation games. Many (most?) of the 3D games don't hold up that well. The aliasing artifacts are still quite visible and many games have occlusion bugs that TFA alludes to.
> They hold up pretty well when you play them as they were originally supposed to: on a CRT if you can or using emulators' CRT filters if you can't
On the emulator side I would definitely recommend Duckstation. It's performant, has great UI / UX and also has a CRT filter available by default that more or less recreates the original look, even slightly warping the image to make you feel like you are staring into a TV tube.
What I find truly ironic is how CRT shaders work best on a 4k display with good HDR performance.
4k lets you scale the image and insert scanlines without scaling artifacts and with enough extra pixels to make the scanlines feel properly soft.
HDR lets the shader compensate for the brightness lost to the CRT filter without desaturating the color.
Fully reproducing the motion clarity of a CRT on a modern display also requires 480hz.
(https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks...)
While HDR is used to reproduce micro-patterns in brightness in such a configuration, I think CRTs would have been capable of HDR with appropriate control electronics since HDR requirements are basically: pixels can individually be set to very close to black and also to "pretty bright".
> I think CRTs would have been capable of HDR
Very likely. CRT technology from phosphors to screen masks to deflection yokes were highly-evolved but there was still a lot of headroom for more performance and new innovation. Some CRT tubes where capable of driving much higher brightness than their controllers ever allowed.
It's unfortunate that CRT manufacturing wound down entirely after ~2010. While the size, weight and huge glass volumes where impractical for mass-market consumer media devices, CRTs also had unique capabilities modern display tech still can't match. With all the current interest in retro CRTs, I actually looked into what it would take to do small runs of ultra high-end HD CRTs for collectors, almost on an artisanal boutique basis. Unfortunately, it looks like the upstream manufacturing chain of many component elements also collapsed because there were no other applications for them. So, the start-up costs to make the first one would be pretty huge.
I would buy a brand new CRT from a boutique manufacturer, even for a pretty absurd price. Whether enough people would is a tough question to answer though.
Nah, I was there a million years ago, and I always thought the PSX looked like crap compared to PC games of the era with their wobbly polygons and warping textures. And that is assuming that you were using SCART with a clean RGB signal, composite was even worse.