@@SPNKr16 People thing a single number describes quality. Then those same people wonder why my old 32 inch 720p t.v. looks so crisp compared to their 80inch 1440p t.v. when theirs is "twice as HD".
Me as well. I played Silent Hill on the PSP. My first thought was "How beautiful! Where have you been all my life?" I absolutely love dithering. It makes games look like a living cross stitch or old Sunday comic.
Dithering is still often used today even with modern game engines, in 2019. It's less noticeable, given that modern 24bit colour monitors can display so many colours, but even with 24bit RGB colour, you'll still see banding of gradients, so a lot of game engines will apply dithering to hide them.
Im not sure how directly comparable it is, but many modern HDR compliant TVs also employ dithering or frame rate control to achieve higher color depth. I guess its somewhat different from dithering, as dithering tries to smooth out a gradient with the existing bit depth via a dither pattern, while FRC tries to achieve new colors to fill the gaps.
SomeRandomIdiot sucks how nvidia makes it hard to force dithering oink. Using registry mods and stuff can fix in some situations. My msi dominator laptop has a 6bpc display but its advertised as 8bpc using dithering. What a messy mess :/
@@shotgunmasterQL It's still dithering. When you do it to adjacent pixels on the screen it's referred to as spatial dithering; when you do it to the same pixel over time it's referred to as temporal dithering. You add noise before quantization (rounding the values into the target color resolution) and your noise function of choice may depend on the pixel coordinates and/or time.
Dithered transparency has become more popular in modern games than smooth transparency, because of the ever increasing resolution and decreasing pixel size, and the ability to antialias... Because dithered transparency is either opaque or just not rendered at all, no complicated sorting is needed to determine which pixel should be in front of another, which saves incredible amounts of hardware resource costs per frame, allowing more complicated VFX to use that, instead of wasting it all on that one guy's hair which keeps clipping through the tree in front of him. Now if only we could get someone to realize they don't need 50gbs of storage space for a 2 hour game.
Agreed. I think the dithering makes it feel more PlayStation. The other consoles at the time without dithering actually look slightly off to me, with their solid and hardly-shaded objects.
One man's charm is another man's ugly. I tend to agree with you, but this is emotionally charged nostalgia informing our opinion, not objective quality.
@@mercster That's just your opinion. Nostalgia is an important factor for a person to like something, so it's a matter of opinion whether it's objective or not
Most games were designed to play on the hardware of the time (such as small crt tvs played at short distance), while some were perhaps limited by it. I recently stopped playing my NES on my 55" lcd tv and have plugged it in to an old small crt monitor. I find the scanlines actually add some much needed texture (for me). I also love getting up close and personal, having the warm glow of a crt tv slowly tan my face.
I wonder sometimes if my enjoyment of old consumer CRTs in addition to RGB/upscaling comes solely from nostalgia or also because of an aesthetic preference at a given moment. I believe it is a little bit of both, and I am often surprised yet also pleased at the fragmentation of how people like to consume their games (Original hardware with RGB on PVM, Composite/RF to consumer set, emulation, etc.)
@@Recals I've noticed this recently. Hot summer nights, putting on my big 55 inch plasma heats up the tiny room in no time. Put on my 27 inch CRT and I can play it all night without it heating up too much. Even my little computer puts out more heat than my CRT.
@@NiekNooijens It's all just preference honestly. I love super sharp pixel art on digital displays (emulation usually being the most painless route) but still have an affection for the fuzz and warmth of a quality CRT. Quirks of being an early 2000s kid I suppose :p
Dynamic dithering is far from extinct in modern games. In fact it seems to have made quite a comeback in today's rendering tech. 3D assets that are streamed in (for example when switching from a LoD mesh) usually fade in using dithering patterns. Dithering is sometimes used for dynamic lighting as well. It was especially prominent in idtech5 games. I honestly thought my GPU was broken or something while playing Wolfenstein TNO because the skin shading on characters featured blatant dithering patterns that looked really jarring. My GSync monitor also dithers the hell out of the screen if I have GSync enabled because it reduces the color depth so much. Was not too happy when discovering that. If you want material for another video on dithering I'd also recommend looking into the software renderer in Unreal Engine 1 games, which applies a dither algorithm on environment textures as a kind of substitute for bilinear texture filtering. It's an interesting effect.
Yep! Super Mario Odyssey utilizes dithering as a visual effect to highlight where Mario is when his model is occluded by other geometry. Immediately reminded me of PS1-era graphics.
If you're curious on why modern games seem to love dithering, it's because of the deferred rendering technique. It requires anything that needs to be blended (ex. transparent objects) to be drawn over opaque objects, which runs in a completely separate rendering pass. Since that takes up precious rendering time, most developers will use dithering since you can avoid blending and resolutions these days are high enough that the effect can sometimes be hidden very well.
The Dreamcast also has dithering, though I don't know if the developers can turn it on and off. I've only recently noticed it, but it's always been there. It's even on the Dreamcast logo screen as it boots up.
I suspect this is due to games of the day using low bit depth textures as well, In order to save VRAM: the Dreamcast supports many texture formats, from RGBA4 (4 bits per channel + 4 bits alpha, 12-bit color) color all the way up to RGB8 (24-bit color). Most developers of the time were already making 15/16-bit textures on the PC, so it was a natural fit.
SegaSaturnSubs 4bit RGBA is 16 bit not 12 ;) Yah 99% of the DC games used 16 bit textures. Usually 4444RGBA or 5551/555- RGBA/RGB. It also has hardware PVR packing of those
@xg223 Motion Blur is mostly a gimmick and if done intentionally in this case, was a poor artistic choice and your attitude is even poorer by comparison. Don't @ me with subjective bias like that ever again.
Did you just compare the beauty of properly applied dithering to pulp in orange juice? Sorry man but pulp is only good in more thin drinks like lemonade.
The dithering in CastleVanian looks like an artistic decision to make the backgrounds appear darker or to grey them out slightly to not distract from the forground. It looks like some developers are using it as a blending tool like a draftsman would wipe pencil or charcoal to help it blend better.
This crt capture is some of the best I've seen. Though I'm watching it through a flatscreen. It can only truly be experienced with the human eye looking at an actual crt. Imo dithering is basically lost on crt. The effect works so well that it makes it look better. I didn't start noticing the dithering till HD lcd. Dithering was used because we all had crt. And now that we have HD flatscreens that reveal every detail, we start to see it and the effect is lost.
LightBlue2222 Yea i have a close to top of the line sony wega hi scan and my ps1 with official svideo cable just looks amazing. Like im playing alot of games over again on it. As im like 30 couple in age, i had a ps1 when new and its my favorite system. Playing on a crt again really makes me feel like its a new game again with decent graphics and no input lag. As the games looked amazing back in the 90s
The single sole reason why Team Silent added the "film grain effect" as an option to the Silent Hill 2 way back in the days, is purely only because they were heavily using dithering with the first Silent Hill and they were trying to maximally *emulate* the "feel of the first game" in the second one, despite it having much better color range and depth. In that particular lieu, Silent Hill 2's "film grain effect" (and also Silent Hill 3's) can be basically considered as it's "dithering".
...you're wrong/remember incorrectly. I personally never liked Silent Hill 2's "film grain" in particular (Silent Hill 3's version of it was an improvement and definitely blends better), due to it looking quite jarring on both my TV and my PC monitor back in the days, so I was always immediately turning it off in settings when I was playing it. On PS 2, Xbox, and PC alike. I think your incorrect memory on it comes from the fact that in SOME (but NOT all of them) Silent Hill-branded games the "film grain"/"noise effect" can be turned off ONLY by finishing the first play-through over, thus appearing as an option essentially only in the "New Game+"/second time around, which is ASS in my personal opinion. However, in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 in particular it definitely can be turned off right away, without you needing to complete the game first.
Dithering isn't as extinct as you might think it is. It's still occasionally used to fade objects that are near the render distance limit. Transparency is incredibly expensive in games because essentially everything loaded into the depth buffer has to be rendered and blended by a pixel shader. Using a dither pattern to slowly mask out an object allows for a smooth fade effect without having to blend colors to calculate transparency.
I had no idea to the extent that the PS1 used dithering, I think it really enhances the presentation for the original hardware. I'm all for that disabled dithering upscaled perspective corrected emulation personally, Maybe throw in a CPU overclock here and there too. If I could unlock the framerate without any glitches to 165hz and apply a HD texture pack I would too. Also gotta have that run ahead to reduce latency... I love emulation.
The color depth of PS1 games was usually far lower than 15-bit on those heavily dithered games. 32K of colors should be enough for a smooth gradient on a CRT monitor with its inherent color bleed. The thing about color depth is that all this color information takes up a lot of space on the 1MB video memory of the original Playstation, which needs to be shared with polygons, shading and other information to display the picture at an acceptable framerate. That's why developers opted for a much lower color depth with dithering, as it was simply more economical in terms of system resources.
Pardon? It doesn't have framebuffer modes which have less than 15bit effective colour. Textures are usually 4-bit CLUT compressed, but the CLUT entries themselves are invariably 15-bit, so that's your underlying colour resolution.
You are talking about dithering and other technical stuff, and I'm just flooded with all these memories and emotions seeing bits and pieces of all those game that defined my teen years. I feel blessed and privileged to have these memories.
I remember way back when I had the ps1. A friend of mine had an earlier european model than me and when I brought mine along we noticed there was a lack of dithering on his system when playing Tomb Raider. It was very noticeably with the under water effects.
You said it was an earlier euro model Playstation? I've heard that PAL (European region) games as opposed to NTSC and NTSC-J (North American and Japanese region) games run a little differently, though I'm a relative newbie to the topic. But possibly that might be what you and your friend noticed.
@@oracle_8947 No. Mine was also a pal unit but slightly newer revision. The CD was slightly different visually. His console broke so I took the cd drive out of it and slightly modified the plastic to fit my console as mine tended to skip in fmw sequences. Like I said, it was really noticeable in tomb raider under water from the water caustic with the lack of smooth gradation.
Great friggin video! For me personally unfiltered textures, integer polygon jumping, and dithering are a huge part of the look. Just like games that used interpolated video to create visual effects, I love to see how they worked within their limitations!
Never understood why dithering was so widespread, I always thought it looked like utter arse in low resolution. This ultra-noticable box/checkerboard pattern that smacks you in the face.
@@martinweizenacker7129 I hope that's what it is. I get banding in a lot of RU-vid videos, and it makes me fear that my monitor calibration might be insufficient.
@@CaveyMoth Well, it is still possible that your monitor does add additional banding on top of the banding already present in the video... You could check that if you just look at a fresh gradient and see if there is banding (not a video, search for gradient PNGs on Google image search for example or generate one yourself in Gimp or Photoshop).
Personally, I like dithering. I think it's a neat effect. I noticed it on every PS1 game I played, and all of the emulators up until like 5 or 10 years ago still emulated that as original. I noticed you had a clip of PE1 in there and I'm hoping you've already done a video on its item system, but if not, I'm hoping you do one in the future.
Personally, I'm the kind of person that absolutely adores the PS1 aesthetic even though I didn't grow up with the system at all, and that grainy effect is no different!
It was the most exciting time in gaming when the Saturn and Playstation came out. We had 3d ish stuff on snes and mega drive (genesis) but it was a giant leap to the 32-bit era and there was no half way era , just straight into fully 3-d , C-D rom based gaming. It was true arcade gaming in the home and arcades used to be the only place you could play these games in their proper form without them being scaled down.
@Retendo I grew up with the PS2, so not that far off of the PSX, and I even played a few PSX games on it since it was backwards compatible. Games like Oddworld, Wipeout, Tomb Raider, Gran Turismo, Pandemonium and a few others. I find as systems get more powerful and more polygons and effects can be shoved onto the screen, game developers tend to make games that are all about the "Shooty shooty bang bang" because they can Michael Bay their way out of any E3 and get praise. I liked games back on the PSX because developers were still figuring out how the frig to actually do literally anything in a 3D space. This meant more experimentation because all of the devs back then were trying to invent the wheel and came up with their own weird ways of doing it. Nowadays everything has already been figured out. Left stick to move, Right stick to turn, RT to shoot, ect. Remember the days of tank controls and bumpers to rotate the camera? All innovation. I feel like the only place I find any of the glorious substance known as "Innovation" anymore is the indie scene. But anyway, I'm rambling.
This is how you do a review You even showed multiple games parts of those games cut scene comparing this is well done good job you've earned a subscriber.
Another one is how the polygons of the ps1 shake around due to floating point precision limitations of the time. Emulators now can disable it, but personally i find it's part of the ps1 charm.
Or the fact that very often, polygons at particular angles on far sides of 3D objects would clip through to become visible on top of 3D polygon faces that were closer to the camera. Textures often did it as well. As a kid, I thought it odd that textures and polygons would warp in shape and size, and that sometimes facial features of characters (like Croc's eyeballs from Croc: Legend of the Gobbos would clip through the skin on the back of his head). Being a first generation 3D capable gaming console came with some weird rounding errors caused by the limited memory and computation capabilities of the system.
Also PS1 didn't have texture filtering, N64 had. N64 graphics were smoother but blurry. PS1 was pixelated but sharper. When I play an old game, I usually prefer the sharp, pixelated look.
@ Back in the mid-to-late 1990s PC games started recieving 3D hardware acceleration support, most notably the Voodoo line of graphics cards by 3DFX using the Glide API. In the PC gaming space, there was no arguement, hardware accelerated games looked MILES ahead better than software rendered games, and had much better framerates and as a result much smoother gameplay. However, looking back, some of the early 3D accelerated titles had missing graphical effects, botched lighting, textures that were just way too filtered and blurred to understand what they represented, and gameplay which seemed sped up (enemies moving too fast) due to the fact most of those games were designed and coded with software rendering in mind, with the 3D hardware acceleration just an afterthought. The original vision of the developers was often the software rendered version of the game. Examples to this are Quake, MDK, Slave Zero, Descent II, Hexen II and many other games. The N64 textures were not just filtered, they were extrmely low res and stretched over a large area, making everything look flat shaded weirdly enough, adding to the cartoonish look associated with the N64, which was an actual hardware limitation rather than an artistic choice.
Honestly, on a crt, they look largely similar and dithering wasn't an issue because that warm glow smoothed it over. N64 a tad smoother, psx, a tad more detailed. People keep forgetting the screens we played these games on.
Devs still use dithering a lot. It's noticed less due to the smaller pixels of HD displays. I see it most commonly used to have "detail" objects like plants fade in instead of popping up.
That's a different but related thing, screen-door transparency! Indeed also an old technique previously prominantly seen on 16-bit systems, and on SEGA Saturn, but fizzled out with newer systems, until it was brought back by deferred rendering.
theLV2 I know right? It’s nuts. Have you ever heard uncompressed N64 tunes? For example, Goldeneye? It’s crazy how much detail was initially there but due to hardware limitations we ended up receiving the product(s) we are now so accustomed to!
Something about this video.... GREAT and it's not just the music. Which is on point. Think it might be the nostalgia hitting me. It's also the love put into this video, the narrator! Quality info. Much love.
I play my PlayStation with RGB going into a Sony PVM. The dithering is very apparent, but I don’t mind it so much. It’s part of what makes the PlayStation look what it is.
IIRC, the dithering was to help with composite video. At the time, most american tvs only had composite video. Hell, I remember $500 tvs with ONE RF INPUT (holy crap!). I genuinely had to look specifically for a tv with S-video. After I found a nice 27" JVC, I was so excited to see the jump in video stability. No more dot crawl, no more phantom edges, YAY! Then, I saw it. Instantly reminded me of a Windows 3.1 in 256 color mode with dithering turned on (the most prominent memory of when I first learned what it was). I was mildly disappointed as I had dropped quite a bit of moolah to get everything together to have S-video. Eventually, when I realized that I don't play 2 feet from the screen, that it stopped bothering me and the many other pluses gained were worth the trade-off. Awesome Vid, I really love the PS1 and kinda wish I'd stopped upgrading game consoles after the PS2 as I have spent more money than I care to remember on displays, cables and such for the newer systems. But, alas, I do enjoy the pixel density of a 4k screen...
a very unique video highlighting a subtle effect I remember from my favorite ps1 games. it was truly an element of the wonder I experienced - these brilliant touches seemed to be produced by the machine in harmony with the artist and designer. this helps me define my appreciation for that era's graphics - the dithering certainly caught my eye though I had no words for it at the time.
Having the best experience will be playing on a CRT screen. Still have the OG console and my old CRT, and the dithering on it just has a certain charm that is quite frankly unbeatable.
I used to be a game programmer long ago on z80 platform using both BASIC and Assembly. At the time, dithering wasn't so widely used because we were dealing with two colors. But there was a trick you could do to increase the bicolor limitation to extend up to 6 colors. By alternating dithered pattern in different intervals, we were able to produce new greyscale image. With clever subroutines created to detect edges where line met, we created an early form of Ambient occlusion using dithering. It was fun times lol.
Great video! For 3d PS1 games, I personally like to use emulation. Retroarch Beetle PSX Hardware, 32 bit, supersampled 8x, and with applying PGXP hack to fix perspective correction + subpixel precision. Overclock to enable 60fps if applicable. It's like re-invigorating the game without showing off flaws like when you just use high-res. Kind of like this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bGeicUHyC5o.html
To put it simply, if you want that authentic PS1 experience, play with dithering on with composite output (or a composite/CRT filter in an emulator), since that's what most people had.
Dithering is definitely a big part of what gives the PS1 games a certain admirable character. Kind of like how low draw distance and blurry textures at 17fps are integral to the N64 experience.
@referral madness it's all about acclimation. We adapt to things like poor framerate because it's just the norm on what we're playing. It's much more prevalent in our youth when infatuation forces us to make due. But no matter how much I wanted to grow that third hand to hold the N64 controller as Nintendo intended, I never could. To this very day I wonder how much greater my experience would have been had I been able to occupy all three grips at the same time :'(
Ok, ok, your technical and objective analysis of these older systems and the output they produced is excellent, dare I say second to none. Amazing. Keep it up.
Thank you for making this video. I'm developing a Unity Asset that simulates PS1 graphics as accurately as possible, so this really gives some good insight on how it handled dithering.
I always felt that dithering was analogous to halftone rosettes in printed artwork, although I didn't have a name for it as a kid. In turn halftone pattern is somewhat reminiscent of the texture in a painting on canvas.
Thank you for putting a name to this flicker I'd see throughout my experiences with video games. There's a battle royale out called "Cuisine Royale" that has this
It’s true that if they blend those dithered colors together that it can result in rainbow bandings but to solve that problem, you need to fuse those colors together to get a smooth transition from one color to the next, and if you apply smooth scaling, then your ps1 games will look more better then ever before,so there’re solutions out there using emulators ir ps1 mods using these advanced filters. Thing is i never looked dithering and i never liked rainbow bandings in the colors. But the reason for what i think they used lots of dithering was not only to get within the restrictions of that system but also to save on memory space.
They still use dithering to this day to lower hardware usage,the checkerbosrding shadows we see in 3d objects in moder games is prevelant still. Black ops 4 on xbox one even !
I think dithering on the Ps1 is part of the charm of the console, just like playing old games in a crt and with your explanations, I still think dithering is really good, now I know what is that "thing" on the ps1 games that I'm always liked more than the blank graphics on some ps2 games or even on the N64.
I have totally forgotten the dithering on games back then. I hated it on Amiga and on ps1 back then. At some point dithering started to vanish from games and made games with dithering look so old. Thanks for great video!
Hi Displaced Gamers! Been watching your videos for a while and they are truly interesting. Speaking about dithering on the PS1, one game that uses it heavily is Ace Combat 3 Electrosphere. To the point that I suspect that it was designed to be the defining visual trait of the game. You can even play a little bit with the effect when the game is in Demo or Replay mode. Just press L2 or R2 to enable some visual effects and you'll surely notice. I seriously think that without dithering, this game wouldn't be as good as it is. Have a good one!
PSX didn't need to, it had 4 built in rendering blend modes on the GPU. Although they were basic additive and subtractive blending, no alpha blending was supported
@@harddriveYT Do you mean using a pattern/mask between 2 opaque images style of dithering? That kind previously done with sprites ? That's 16bit era stuff, which of course you can do using images, but I don't see why when in a lot of cases the hardware blending available on the PSX is far more flexible.
@@SerBallister Well it doesn't matter whether you see why or why not, right? The developers used it. Perhaps it didn't cost that much. Dissolve dithering was used prevalently for transparencies. Even the old school flicker technique was used a lot.
@@SerBallister tinyurl.com/sa3jsty here's an example on an emulator even when you turn off the global colour dithering. Smoke trails on Gran Turismo are still employing dithering for transparency. This technique was also used a lot for those rudimentary circle grounding shadows. Also used for LOD gradated pop-in, although it was more of a fixed checkerboard pattern for that.
Might as well play a new Gran Turismo game? It's not all about graphics. GT1 is easily the most fun of the series, with a balanced campaign that doesn't just force you to buy the best cars and drive extremely realistically. Also, the tracks are all made from pieces of each other, so you get lots of tracks but don't have to memorise them all, since you've seen the corners on other tracks. Genius.
As a huuuge GT2 fan, I didn't know that about GT1, I will try it again soon, all of this sounds extremely interesting. That being said, it's possible that my favorite "campaign" in any racing game ever comes from Need For Speed High Stakes (the PSX version, which is very different from the PC version) I miss racing games that gave you money to buy upgrades, I think it greatly increased replayability value.
Great video! I’m still undecided as to whether I like dithering or not. I’m one of those purists who love the PlayStation graphics as originally intended, chunky blocky polygons and warped textures as seen on original hardware are my jam. But dithering... hmm.
Though I’m not sure how much/in what fashion this was used in early consoles, but dithering is also used in audio encoding! It is essentially used for the same reason, masking unwanted artifacts caused by low bit-depths in the rendering. It’s still used in just about every field today and I’m guessing especially for early consoles in the first wave of sample-based audio like the SNES and PS1, they must have needed to use it extensively (or at least should have!).
God bless you sir for pronouncing aesthetic correctly grinds my gears how every gaming-centric outlet uses the hard T "a-sTet-ic", makes it sound like a baby is pronouncing it
Flying around in Ace Combat 3's polygon environments and skyboxes on original hardware on a CRT looks amazing to this day. There's something mesmerizing about the dithering effect on top of the aesthetic style of the game underneath.
@@XylitoIAssault Horizon.... lol no one wanted a wannabe cod ace combat. also it is insane because Japanese reviewers gave the game insane high scores while in the west the game got destroyed. don't know if Japanese actually like it or are paid scores
It's nice to see a good explanation on dithering and how color pallets are effected by the signals and options given, to the trained eye that's fixated on this kind of detail i imagine it would be an issue, but for me personally until this video explained it. i never really noticed any of these dithering issues because i always looked at the game as a whole and never zoomed in to analyze every pixel, sure i would want my games to look good and i try to opt for above composite options even with my CRT to do so, but this sort of in depth dithering stuff has never been a hindrance in my enjoyment of these great games. I do know on Emulators you can make the games look as great as possible and that's great, but that's just me. Great to see what all the fuss is about though.
CRT doesn't get rid of dithering. You see it just fine. You are aware that he's on a CRT in this video, right? Not all the time, but several times? Right? Exactly to SHOW that you STILL see the dithering, heavily?
I think in some cases it looks good, in some cases it doesn't. Similarly I'm sure PS2 style interlaced graphics look good in some cases. But usually not.
Half of the games I can't see the dithering. The other half, they look bad without dithering. They look... Fake or cheap. Am I the only one who barely notices/cares?
That’s why I prefer n64 to ps1. I knew I wasn’t crazy, these pixelated graphic did happen on the ps1. And this explains why ps1 games look terrible on modern TVs.
Upscaling is overrated in my opinion, these games were never meant to be seen that clearly and I find it detracts from their originally intended presentation. Dithering looks like crap with it's crystal clear and you can see every pixel, the whole point was the standard definition screens of the time would naturally blur it together to give the illusion of more color depth. Prefer all of my pre-HD games to be running on the real original hardware with RCA composite on a CRT TV.
