Why pre-HD games often look their best at their original low-resolution. 0:00 Ico's 240p Origins 2:50 The benefits of low-fidelity 4:30 PS1 in HD 7:14 N64 in HD 9:40 Sixth Gen Upscaling 11:53 Embracing the jaggies
Thanks for tuning in, here's a complete list of the games and other media featured in this vid (in order, not including repeats). The movie featured in the VHS part is The Evil Dead (1981). Ico (PS2) Ocarina of Time (N64) Tomb Raider (PS1) Panzer Dragoon (Saturn) Tekken Tag Tournament (PS2) Wind Waker (GameCube) Shenmue (Dreamcast) Jak & Daxter (PS2) Silent Hill (PS1) Silent Hill 2 (PS2) Final Fantasy X (PS2) Game Design Methods of Ico (GDC Talk 2004) The Evil Dead (1981) Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) Final Fantasy VIII (PS1) Morrowind (PC) Yakuza (PS2) Resident Evil 4 (GameCube) Vagrant Story (PS1) Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (N64) Dirge of Cerberus (PS2) F.E.A.R. (PC) MediEvil (PS1) Koudelka (PS1) Metroid Prime (GameCube) Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (PS2) Silent Hill 3 (PS2) Metal Gear Solid (PS1) Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1) Resident Evil 2 (PS1) Tomb Raider II (PS1) Harry Potter (PS1) Ape Escape (PS1) Resident Evil 1 (PS1) Parasite Eve II (PS1) Final Fantasy VII (PS1) Chrono Cross (PS1) Wipeout 3 (PS1) Resident Evil 3 (PS1) Final Fantasy IX (PS1) Mega Man Legends 2 (PS1) Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (PS1) Crash Bandicoot (PS1) Banjo Kazooie (N64) Wave Race 64 (N64) Conker's Bad Fur Day (N64) Pokemon Snap (N64) Mario Kart 64 (N64) Goldeneye 007 (N64) Pilotwings 64 (N64) Kirby 64 (N64) Mario 64 (N64) Sin & Punishment (N64) Majora's Mask (N64) Shadow Man (N64) Perfect Dark (N64) Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (PC) Shenmue (Dreamcast) Halo (Xbox) Soulcalibur (Dreamcast) Okami (PS2) Ratchet & Clank (PS2) Metal Gear Solid 3 (PS2) Dragon Quest VIII (PS2) We Love Katamari (PS2) Super Monkey Ball (GameCube) F-Zero GX (GameCube) Viewtiful Joe (GameCube) Killer 7 (GameCube) Power Stone (Dreamcast) Sonic Adventure (Dreamcast) Fable: The Lost Chapters (PC) Panzer Dragoon Orta (Xbox) Ninja Gaiden Black (Xbox) Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (GameCube) Gitaroo Man (PS2) Valkyrie Profile 2 (PS2) Resident Evil Remake (GameCube) Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2) Onimusha (PS2) God Hand (PS2) Devil May Cry (PS2) Thief: Deadly Shadows (PC) Starfox Adventures (GameCube) Ridge Racer (PS1) Mega Man Legends (PS1) Skies of Arcadia (GameCube)
@IntegerOfDoom Nope, not the only one, people tend to confuse the terms upscaling with increasing resolution and vice versa. Upscaling is scaling the resolution of original content to a higher resolution without changing the base content resolution by scaling methods. Increasing Resolution actually increases the resolution of the content physically.
You make good points. I always upscaled without thinking much of the visuals, but seeing your examples has changed my mind! And when you started speaking about 6th gen it was like you were inside my head and that was amazing! Thank you for the great video! :)
First time I emulated Wind Waker was the last time I upscaled a game. Unless it was made for an HD TV I always use native resolution. It just looks weird otherwise
I've been playing PS1 games like Final Fantasy VII on my old PSP lately and I was having this same thought. These older games especially with pre-rendered backgrounds like much more natural on the lower res screen.
There's some pretty good CRT filters out there these days that actually recreate the look of a CRT very intricately. I personally use CRT royale for a lot of old games and it makes a night and day difference.
@@THRACIA776ISTHEGREATEST4K certainly helps for scanlines but I've never found it to be essential. The 1080p scanline presets on the Mister are really nice.
I personally think the 240P systems like Saturn and PlayStation, (also the 224P PS2 to an extent) and the 480P systems like the GameCube, Dreamcast and Xbox all gave us amazing games with their limitations, because those force innovation and innovation usually makes fun games. Modern systems and their games are usually just "Look how many pores she has!" and lack style.
Downsampling is literally the perfect middle ground between native res looking too blurry or blocky, and upscaling exposing all the flaws. I recently played Majora's Mask PC port with 120 FPS and 960p downsampled to 240p, play it in 4:3 and it looks GORGEOUS. Im trying to implement a CRT shader for it soon to get that authentic experience, with the more stable image and higher frame rate ofc.
@@rehaansiddiqieDownsampling options are something I really want to see more of in future fan decomp ports and official HD remasters. It's just a very nice option to have.
@@ThePreciseClimber I think so, the image is much more smoother, but there is some aliasing visible in the distance when playing MM. Although I think that can be solved with the MSAA option.
I mostly browse RU-vid on the subscriber tab and couldn't remember subbing to this one. Looked at your vids and only saw the RE1 video as watched. Yep, well worth the subscription. This video proves it.
There is a strong argument for limiting uprendering to only 2x, that way you retain the artistry of many 240p (and even 480i) games, while making it more tolerable on modern displays. That said, a quality video scaler with appropriate scanline options go a long way in respecting the intended image of any fifth or sixth generation release.
I adore ICO and have consumed reviews ever since it came out. I remember the magazine I had that talked about it. And later on as a retro game I've watched many RU-vid videos about it. It wasn't until today I learned it runs at such low resolution. I only remember the magazine review mentioning it had a few jagged edges as a minor thing, but raving about the graphical fidelity all the same. I'm blown away. Coincidentally, I loved Shadow of the Colossus in PS2 but didn't particularly like the PS3 HD remaster because I could spot part of what made the original so special was the blurriness. I am now going through the PS4 remakester, and while I'm loving it and appreciating it for what it is, I'm fully aware something was lost.
As it happens, I am watching this video on a CRT at 1280x960 at 70 hz. I especially love the motion clarity of the lower resolutions at high refresh. 640x480 for 90s PC games especially just looks so right.
Great job on this. Informative and well thought out. The comparison to horror on VHS is very salient; for some reason it has never occurred to me to make it.
Paper Mario rendered at 240p on N64. The characters and text blended quite well with the rest of the game. Nintendo chose 480p for the VC rereleases and the textures look out of place as a result. The 240p allowed the characters to blend in more naturally with the environment and further enforce it's storybook aesthetic. Conker's Bad Fur Day sometimes looks like a pre-rendered image at 240p.
@@kidrobot. Even if it's a pop up book, it's still weird for the characters to be significantly lower resolution than the environment they live in. The characters blending together with it's environment completes the pop up look. Upscaling just makes the characters look plastered into the world. Out of place. Contributes nothing to the pop up aesthetic. The environment and characters blending together just makes the aesthetic more consistent.
Fun fact: Perfect Dark actually does support hi-res on real N64 hardware. It just makes the game's frame rate a lot more sluggish. Good for glitches in speedruns though.
You could go out for a bite and come back inbetween frame drops without missing a beat for some of those 480i N64 games. Perfect Dark multiplayer with hi-res mode is genuinely like 9fps on average or something mental like that.
(hello, Nikku) It might be worth mentioning that the high res mode is actually still 240p, just more detail on the horizontal axis, (despite some misinformation that index first on some search engines). So something closer to what Ico's doing, heh.
I picked up a CRT a couple of years ago, only really expecting to use it for lightgun games, but it radically shifted how I play old games, and the bulk of old games look dramatically better like that. High-end PS1 stuff in particular really benefits from the way a CRT displays its images. I don't want to sound like an old tech snob, or imply that you shouldn't play old games if you don't have a full set-up of vintage equipment, but I used to be happy playing those discs on a PS3, and I could never go back to that now.
@IntegerOfDoom Yeah, I've ended up buying an RGB Sony DVD Player, and it's remarkable how much better some of those discs look. David Lynch's digitally-shot Inland Empire and the 2006 laserdisc transfers of Star Wars have been particular highlights.
Very well made video! I'll concurr that standard definition games indeed vastly benefit from a CRT filter. Reshade with GeomCRT will get you there nearly instantly to mimic most consumer CRTs, but if you're a picky Sony Trinitron user like me, you can opt for CRT Royale with a Grille mask. I was able to do a near-perfect imitation of my own Trinitron, thanks to it having only 500 triads, which only needs 1500 pixels on the LCD to reproduce accurately. This does an incredible job at hiding the dithering, and create more immersive color depth and contrast. Even non-filtered, PGXP corrected and downsampled models can look a bit weird, while the CRT will trick your eyes into filling the gaps where you don't really see. 2D assets might even look almost 480p. Lastly, a CRT filter will immensely help overcome inconsistent pixel sizes brought by games rendered in a non-4:3 resolution while still expecting a 4:3 output. Take CTR for instance which renders in 512x216 in NTSC. It's a great way to bring back those rectangular pixels in good even shape accross the line! And now I kinda wish console manufacturers could put a little bit more care in bringing old emulated games with proper presentation, instead of doing what was merely the bare minimum of emulation in 2005.
Real shit man. I mostly use 2x native resolution for retro games as I feel that they're less jaggy and nice to look at while not completely undermining the intended effect of the game devs by running in 4k ultra hd, this applies most to the 5th generation of games the most with the 240p resolution I know it's a different topic but everytime I see someone using the 4x hq, xbrz Or whatever filter especially on 2D games, the filter that makes the games look like they are smothered in petroleum jelly Vaseline. I think Humanity strays further and further from god
2x internal bump is a solid choice for lots of games. Still keeps the jaggies but doesn't go overboard. There were a few things I wanted to cover in this vid that I couldn't find a way to work in without bloating it, like viewing distance. Topaz AI upscaling reminds me of Waifu 2x and all those smeary ZSNES filters people loved in the 2000s. The LOOKIN GOOD' meme never dies.
@@Fonald3D I have such an embarassing history with these godawful filters In the early 2010s I got into emulation as a young naive kid I googled "how to make pokemon fire red have good graphics HD" And it lead me to a video recommending one of those filters... And despite not liking it, my placebo effect ass kept religiously playing with those kinds of filter religiously for a solid year or two, because some random foreign RU-vidr says so I'm still surprised how many people especially in foreign countries prefer the smeary filters over sharp pixels, Maybe it's some sort of a cultural thing that the blended pixels may be considered better since the you can't really see any sharp pixely edges
Thank you! I felt a bit alone, arguing about lower/intended resolution for both games and movies 😌 Using, or rather relying on in some cases, technical limitations as a stylistic choice seems to have been forgotten.
What I like to do is take a high resolution and downscale to 240p and then add in a CRT filter. The reason why is because you get better aliasing, the UI just looks correct, and it looks like how it would have back in the 90s. I don't care a ton for the sharp pixel look. CRT filters, high quality ones, are king for retro games both 2D and 3D when they're from the 5th gen and before
Fix geometry + Fix color + 16:9 aspect ratio hack where it makes sense + 1.5-2.0x upscale + very minimal scanline = works for my Saturn/PS1/PS2/Dreamcast/N64 (I just set it and forget it ~)
Aiming to release a few smaller vids after this one which will take a lot less time to produce, but thanks for your patience. Thanks for hangin on.
9 часов назад
Back in the day, low-res was all we had. It wasn't optimal or desired, any more than pooping in an outhouse was optimal or desired. If I see low-res art today, that better running on an NES otherwise there's no excuse.
At 5:00 the warping is from integer math. So for example 10 * Cos(30) = 8, instead of the expected 8.66. As for why, integer math takes less circuitry and is faster.
Great ass video man! I enjoyed it thoroughly - glad you made it. This is a topic I've spent too many decades at this point thinking about at this point - going back to early emulators and the first tiny TV I saved for with allowance (and birthday money) that had composite. I even remember getting my first HDTV (720p LCD) in college and having my mind blown by how detailed Oblivion and Gears of War looked on it... then I by chance hooked the PS2 up to it a week later to finish Grandia III, Radiata Story and Megaman X Collection (240p) and was wondering why these games I had been playing before I switched TVs, suddenly looked like total ass. It's been a long journey for sure. 📺
Excellent video, I used to upscale every 3D game I emulated but these days I feel original resolution is almost always the best look. Perhaps it comes from my recent experiences with real hardware on both CRT and video scalers, there really is a lot that can be said for assets and effects being tailored to an intended output resolution.
I love seeing this topic being discussed. We're now at the point where whole generations of people were exposed to SD-era gaming entirely though emulation, and many are likely unaware of how important the original resolution (and yes, CRT display characteristics) are to the aesthetics of those decades of games. Anyways, I could ramble on, but in short -- loved the video, and thanks for bringing light to the topic!
Biggest issue with flat panels is the fact they are stuck to a single resolution and anything but that looks like hot garbage due to scaling artifacts, without an external scaler anyway. It's a mess and I wish we could go back to a panel that uses phosphors instead so every resolution actually looks crispy and proper like they are supposed to.
slow clap on this one. I mean, when everyone shows me Sonic the Hedgehog "missing" water effects and such, I think "eh, I always wanted it to look sharper" when I was a kid. But THIS... man, really makes me hold my original copy of ICO a little tighter, lol. I usually think that every developer would have uncompressed visuals, higher resolutions if only the hardware would have handled it much like when you put a GameBoy Advanced game into emulation and upscale (even on the not-ideal GameBoy Player of the GameCube).
Rather It's low resolution or high resolution I adapt to whatever. But for me what matters the most is if the game is good or bad. I think retro games have a unique charm to them and some not all newer games or games from the past generations have had their own unique charms to them as well. Cool video. ^_^
One very notable problem with playing older PC games at higher resolutions is the HUD scaling. Very rarely is there an option for 1:1 HUD scaling to keep the original, intended look (you just gotta hope HUD scaling is there by default, like in Psychonauts or Ubisoft's PS2 era games). Those buggers can get too small for comfort even in 1080p. And downright microscopic in 4k. Some games have fixes available (e.g. Deus Ex Human Revolution, Bioshock Infinite) while a bunch of others don't.
I still know a lot of people who use Avi video cables when they play their video games the retro consoles at least but I've been using this video since 2003
Glad you mentioned the CRT scanlines, that's exactly what my pedantic, overweight, self was wanting to point out. Great quality video. Keep it up please!
The PS1's limitations being due to Z-buffering is a huge misconception. The console's GPU is a glorified 2D triangle monster that has no sense of 3D whatsoever. A Z-buffer (or the usual name, a depth buffer) is a means for being able to write and store the depth at where each pixel was drawn, which allows future draws to discard drawing pixels should their depth be occluded by what's currently present at that area. The console thus required manually calculating depth for triangles and really only gave you means to accelerate this by using the GTE coprocessor, which handled all of the 3D math you'd want to do quickly and building of lists of triangles for the GPU to draw. What the lack of per-pixel depth means is mainly a lack of fine accuracy, thus a lot of problems in having geometry appear on top or behind when it shouldn't. Games like Crash Bandicoot relied on having the game play at a fixed camera to pre-calculate the depth of triangles and thus largely avoid many of those issues and save some time while at it. The affine texture mapping is a result of the GPU having no means for perspective correction. It simply draws in the textured triangles and you can only really alleviate the issue by creating more geometry near the camera (tesselation), some games like the Quake 2 port did this. As a fun fact, the N64's GPU does do perspective correction for texturing and may actually toggle it off if requested, but both it and the PS1 do not actually do correction for vertex colors, though it's a much more visually subtler problem. (go look at footage of Vagrant Story for an example of peak vertex color usage in the PS1)
I don't care for the scanlines of those ugly TVs, but maan do I love intentionally disabling all of the filtering and disabling all the mipmapping because I love how sharp and clear it makes all of the textures HaloPC with forced point-sampling kind of reminds me of the pixellated square lighting used in Alien PS1
I used my landlord’s 480p Zenith Plasma TV today with some 480p Dreamcast games patched for widescreen (Powerstone, Resident Evil: Code Ceronica, Zombie Revenge and PStone 2) it looks GODLY. Absolutely craps on the Roku 1080p LCD. I messed around with Bomb Rush CyberFunk and it legitimately feels like an optimized Dreamcast game or early Xbox Game. Even RE5 looked good on it at 60FPS with the blur disabled. I think the PS4 Gen on a 1080p Plasma and PS5 will destroy any 4K LCD and some OLEDs in Image quality
I just have a few things to say, about CRTs, CRT video filters are really accurate already and there are external devices that add filters. on PS1 games gamers usually used composite (the red white and yellow cables) so dithering wouldn't be seen anyway perfect dark has 480i support on the N64, although it does cause the framerate to tank honestly I just can't go back to the pixellated look, it just isn't right, so I just use 1 or 2 smooth upscaling methods to keep the original resolution and keep it smooth, for why I use 2, it's because my favourite upscaling device (the mclassic) has a minimum supported resolution of 640 x 480, so I use an application that allows any windowed app to be upscaled with FSR 1.0, I do not like the look of FSR 1.0 that much, but letting it do a slight upscale and combining it with the mclassic, it results in a really nice smoothed upscale, sure it's not 100% CRT accurate, but it is more accurate than sharp pixels on a modern display. honestly if you already have an mclassic or mcable try experimenting with it. I should probably put a sidenote for those playing PS2 games, if you're playing the Kingdom hearts games those games actually run at 512 x 384, the reason PCSX2 will report 512 x 448, is because the game upscales the vertical resolution to make it work with CRT TVs, most PS2 games will run at 512 x 448 or 640 x 448, as a result I recommend setting your PC's video output to 720 x 480, this will allow you to keep the aspect ratio closer to 4:3, if you're playing a 512 x 448 game with FSR, leave the mclassic in green, it'll stretch the image output to make it look like 4:3, if it is 640 x 448, set the mclassic to blue, this will make it closer to 4:3, if you can find an FSR 1.0 based upscaler that allows stretching of the aspect ratio of the window, then things will be much simpler. for 240p games you're pretty much stuck with using FSR to get the image to 480p to help the mclassic for wii and gamecube games I don't know if the dolphin emulator has a setting to enable overscan to be visible as this is visible on real wii hardware. dreamcast is probably the easiest both on original hardware and emulation thanks to VGA on most games, however you might need to de-interlace the few games that don't support VGA. I know I did an earlier mention of PS2, but for a majority of games that don't have progressive scan, it's the same story for the few dreamcast games that don't support VGA. microsoft's auto super resolution might be a useful feature for emulators that support DX11 or DX12, however I'm unsure what limitations there are due to me not having windows 11 on my PC, but it seems like a useful feature, I hope to see some coverage of it on emulators as I want to see how good it is at handling 240p and 480p, and how high it can upscale those to before it starts to look bad.
So true. Upscaled emulation looks weird, even when the games don't have graphical issues from rendering at much higher resolutions. It's not how these games were designed. I tried a few of the recent PS Plus releases of PS1 and PSP games and they're a no for me. Ironically the PS2 games being closer to original res look much better, despite that causing controversy. I'd still rather stick to PC hobbyist emulators though.
I mostly agree with you about N64 but I seriously can't wait to get an RGB de-blur mod for my system. Not a fan of the smear that's applied over every graphical element when they already had a decent blur only being applied to 3D elements. Otherwise though this was like listening to myself rant on these topics with how similar both our views are. Even disregarding that great video!
Any time videos like this pop up there’s so many assumption about what was intended and what really came down to “ship this I guess it’s the best we can do”.
A bit off topic for this video but i love how upset some retro game enthusiasts get over some old games being 480i instead of 480p. I find it hilarious
GREAT video! agreed as well, except when talking about the PS2 specifically. The PS2's GPU was actually very weak, the weakest of this generation, Ico was hardly the only game really running at 224p, developers back then abused the CRTs ability to do field rendering, basically faking a higher x448 picture by rendering half of the pixels half of the time. That's also what allowed the PS2's CPU to go BRRRT with higher polygon overall than the Dreamcast. But unfortunately interlacing just isn't a thing on modern screen, and you can't really "emulate" how it looks except with perhaps one of those expensive scalers. Even the PS1 or Saturn 240p is better than 224p, so forcing PS2 games to run progressive at such a low res is absolutely not a good idea. Only a few PS2 games actually had a 480p option.
In reality most Ps2 field rendering games are from early 2000-2001, from 2002 onwards most Ps2 games are not using field rendering anymore, and the few that still use it are pretty sure rendering in a progressive back buffer. Also field rendering is as valid at drawing 480 lines of picture data as it is progressive rendering, and no, a field rendered game is not a 240p game using magic upscaling to fake 480 lines.
the first time i felt this was when i played ff7 on the playstation classic. i was used to the modern ports on steam, switch, and ps4 and when i finally saw the original resolution, it was hard to go back to the "upgraded" version. those jagged models and low res textures just don't look good at all in HD.
Those scalers don't do anything to the actual rendering resolution of a console. They just scale the system's original output res up in a way that's far cleaner and sharper than what your TV or monitor is capable of doing. Everything is still the same, it just does the stretching part of the upscaling process better. I've got a Tink5X and I'm a big fan.
its not just for retro stuff. look at lethal company. ya the dev did take the money and ran. but man it was a pretty pixelated game. edit: 4:03 that crt has a piercing noise holy fck
Nah, still sticking with HD and 4K. My head hurts so much just hearing the CRT buzz. Makes playing games unplayable and movies and shows unwatchable for me. Not too mention how overpriced old school hardware costs and how heavy a CRT is and how much electricity it drains. And I can't even live without the quality of life improvements in collections and remasters, anyway. I wouldn't be able to beat Mega Man 1 - 6 without the rewind and save states introduced in the Legacy Collection. Playing these games on original hardware sucks in my opinion after getting spoiled with the rereleases with HD/4K resolution. Once I go with the rerelease, I can never go back to original hardware. Though I did try KH 1 and 2 on PS2, for 30 minutes each before returning to play the HD/4K versions on PS5. I just refuse to play on dated hardware and screens when I have games on superior modern hardware and screen.
This whole focus on trying to be realistic concept is drastically backfiring & ruining games. It looks awful. They are better off taking an unrealistic/ artistic route. The realism can destroy any sort of escapism. It can destroy the soul to a game. It looks off putting & unappealing. I miss older game designs SO MUCH all of that didn't have to just go away just because things are "progressing" It sure doesn't feel like progress. How can gaming be so out of touch with good game design or good artistic direction? It basically feels like 95% of the game industry has been taken over by people who have no idea what a good game is because they don't play video games and didn't play games growing up. Where is THE PASSION! Growing up in the 90's, It really felt like the future of gaming was going to be awesome. It wasn't just about graphics. It was physics effects, art styles, a range of gameplay mechanics, damage effects, environmental interaction, an assortment of gameplay modes, engaging CPU to play against in single player modes, offline modes. Current video games focus way too much on graphical nitpicking. It seems they forgot how much players enjoyed physics effects & other aspects that make games fun. Quirky graphics can work, if a creative art style is used. Add engaging CPU AI, gameplay modes, the list goes on.. idk what happened? Also: {We have seen that even if companies delay games, it isn't improving the quality of games being released. Which is a sign there is a MUCH DEEPER issue going on with modern games. No excuses, devs used to make great games with much less and they would have given anything to have certain capabilities to utilize that are available today. It just takes actual passion, focus & talent to make great games. Sidenote: It's so crazy how many people are still supporting super mega rich companies putting out unacceptable products.. i don't understand certain people. I don't understand how certain companies can be messing up so badly. It's frustrating that other passionate people are not allowed to make a version of a type of game that we used to have but no longer get anymore.. Yet these huge companies get full control over if an unused game IP gets made & they do everything they can so no other versions of a game idea will ever come out. Even if there's a huge fan base around certain ideas and there's a ton of passionate devs out there dying to make a version of a certain video game idea.. that frustrates me beyond belief}
As someone who grew up on PC gaming and the N64 I absolutely can't stand the texture warping of the PS1 and have no idea how you Sony gamers put up with that. It's the first thing I fix when emulating, or in the case of Tomb Raider I just play the native PC port.
@@casualcadaver Also older 3d PC Dos games running in software mode had problems with texture warping. So to me the Ps1 aesthetic reminded me of the PC MS-DOS Master Race.
