CORRECTIONS/ANNOTATIONS: 1. The videos at 16:14 are swapped 2. There is also a horizontal blur vilter applied from the Video Interface. This one can be turned off in software and it DOES gain you a bit of performance, but you can ONLY turn this off if you also disable antialiasing first, so that's likely why no developers opted to doing it. This blur is actually extremely noticeable and many output mods disable it.

My feeling is that during the N64's lifetime, there was the perception that pixelated graphics looked "old" or "obsolete" and was at odds with the feeling of rapid advancement that defined the first gen of 3d consoles. That would lead devs to, consciously or not, prefer techniques that eliminated the appearance of individual pixels, even at the cost of making the image less sharp

2:19 Kaze: "You can no longer see any blur" Youtube Compression: "Allow us to introduce ourselves"

5:00 Ah yes, the famous Ocarina of time trilinearily filtered staircase. We all know it.

What's funny is I remember gaming magazines talking about how much smoother N64 games looked than the "jagged" PS1 graphics. In fact, one of the highlights of the PS2 was the fact it not only played PS1 games, but could apply bilinear filtering to them!

Now wait a second... For many years i was hearing PS1 and Saturn fans bash the N64 for the tiny 4k texture cache... and the PS1 has only 2k? First time i'm hearing this.

Can I make a suggestion? When you are comparing the subtle effects of different settings, try not to use filters/transitions over them. For example, at 3:54 you have a soft dissolve between the effects, which when combined with the effects only being on screen for <1 second each, makes it really hard to tell what to look for. Similarly at 4:26 when showing trilinear filtering, I'd prefer if you didn't split screen, and then completely black out one half. If you're going to do that, just show them one after another, full-screen screen each. Thanks for listening to these nits! Really great and informative video!

I feel like the problem nowadays is a lot of modern games don't even design around their limitations anymore and just plow through them and have tons of issues as a result (Pokemon). I think Mario Odyssey is a great example of a modern game that still tries to play around console limitations and looks great as a result.

I think an important aspect to keep in mind is that the output of all the consoles of this gen were primarily expected to be sent to a CRT, which didn't really display "pixels" in the first place. Both the PS1s jitteriness and the N64s blurriness were kinda "normalized" by the way the CRT actually rendered the image vs modern flatscreens

Kaze you've missed by far the most important aspect of why the N64 is blurry - VI Blur. There's a post-rendering filter applied to all N64 output that adds a half pixel blur to every single pixel. While the software video output is normally 320x240, the actual perceptible output is 640x240, with each half pixel being blurred to the next. No amount of software tweaks can fix this issue, this filter is applied in hardware to every output. It's possible to recover the original unblurred image fairly easily, by sampling from real hardware at double the horizontal frequency and discarding every other pixel. This is not an issue on emulators at all, as it's the video output stage of the N64, not the software stage.

another thing you didn't go into here is that the n64's video output actually has a fixed horizontal width, the DAC always outputs 640 pixels/line regardless of the game's framebuffer resolution, so if a game ran at a lower resolution, the n64 would actually just use linear interpolation (the blurriest interpolation) to stretch it horizontally to fill the screen (or at least as much of the screen as the developers wanted). most games were stretched 2:1, so 320 being doubled to 640, this meant that for each real pixel displayed, there was also an interpolated pixel which was just the average of the pixels on either side of it. contrast this with the playstation 1, where the console couldn't stretch the image digitally, but instead just supported 5 different pixel clocks, with games switching between them depending on their current resolution. this would have looked significantly sharper, especially at lower resolutions another factor, which would not have been a problem during the period, but is a problem now, is the pixel clock itself. the n64's pixel clock was such that the total width of each line (including blanking and hsync) was 773.5 pixels wide, as opposed to the modern standard, which is 858 pixels wide, so if you take the video output from an n64 and feed it into a digitizer of some kind, the active area will most likely be stretched from 640 pixels wide to approximately 709.9 pixels wide, this blurs the image even further on top of the earlier 320>640 stretch that the console did, and is also irreversible

1995: You can't see the pixels 😍 2025: YOU CAN"T SEE THE PIXELS 🤬

I'm in blur gang. I remember playing Mario64 DS for the first time and wondering why it looked so much worse.

16:12 it looks like you accidentally switched the blurred and not blurred side

There are key historical reasons as well. Silicon Graphics was THE flagship company for B2B graphics computing at the time, so the Nintendo 64 graphics pipeline was architectured to be cinema-grade quality, meaning its offered AA, texture filtering, anti-dithering, were respected like a bible for graphics progress. Everything discussed in the video was seen through CRTs at the time that will use the pixel data as analog rays. That lack of fidelity made it so much harder to know how a game would look on the final customer TVs, but gave the benefit of a very sharp analog approximation, sharp enough for developers to even scale down below 240p and let the scan lines do the rest. Of course, low resolution compromised understanding what is happening specially far away in games because you see some things popping and disappearing (Conker multiplayer was something), but didn't feel that blurry at all. Perfect Dark or Turok were FPS in which understanding what is happening far away in the game was important, a bit competitive even, so they went the extra mile for these higher res modes.

I think a lot of this comes down to personal taste. Personally, I like the tri-linear blurred textures of the N64 more than the PS1 pixelated textures, but I can see why others think the opposite.

I'm waiting for the day somebody optimizes Minecraft 3ds as much as you've optimized Super Mario 64

i think one of the things that are not discussed here, which is important, is pixel bleeding, this consoles were MEANT for crt displays, most of that fuzz may lower or increase depending on what display people had at the time

2:19 Kaze: "you can no longer see any blur" Me, without my glasses: 😑

I liked the idea of this generation of consoles being the sprite machine, the disk machine, and the 3d machine. Honestly, checks out!