Vaguely related. We recently implemented dithering in to the hardware renderer in PCSX2, and we've had pretty much nothing but complaints from people wondering what all the noisy colours are 🤣
@Know Thy Enemy Emulation is not suppose to make things look better, thats just something people have done. Emulation was about making software that can emulate hardware 1:1 including the bad aspects of the system.
@Know Thy Enemy as @Enigma776 said, it is intended to emulate the system as accurately as possible, you can turn it off and render in 32bit if you really want to (which is what PCSX2 has done until recently)
@Know Thy Enemy In addition to the other comments, an emulator can only do so much if a Developer found ways to do shortcuts to make their game run on actual hardware. CPU work on internal buffers for instance. Or per-game hard baked values. HD Remakes, being ports, can at least hand tweak things to account for modern graphics systems. But an emulated PS1 game can't just insert a light into the rendering pipeline that wasn't there in the game code and data.
@Know Thy Enemy it's not terrible because the textures are 32bit, so if we emulate a 32bit buffer it looks fine, though the colours look lighter (in GTA SA at least), but yes the banding looks very obvious in some games without dithering
I had recently the same idea, i think it is totally crazy to have all these powerful processors 32 and 64 bits and an old Motorola 68000 13 MHz! Carmack said it was the main problem : Replace the 68k with another 32 bit RISC, add dynamic cache to it and give the blitter at least a small buffer. He claimed that with these changes, the Jaguar would not have matched the performance of PS1 or Saturn but would have been “competitive”.
When you think about it, this makes our eyes and the parts of our brain that process the input look so amazing. We're seeing and processing several million different colours every second of our waking lives like it's nothing special.
Yeah I miss that. Even when it came to games. Each game in the same genre has a distinct look. Now everyone is going for realism which means everything will end up looking the same. I appreciate what Nintendo does, but I just wish their system had more power so we can see the true beauty of their games
@@marksnethkamp8633 precisely. Even with the same engine, they could make the games with their own special look. I like the hyper realism of certain games but ever game doesn't need to do this as, by default, every game will end up looking the same. A game like GEARS looks realistic but it still has a distinct style that sets it apart. I appreciate that.
Dithering is also a technique used in printing through screening. We dont mix cmyk to create new colors on paper, we just place dots of each ink beside each other so they give the illusion of more colors Therefore, you can say screening started before electronic displays, it started when lithographic plate printing started Heck you can even say it started when we started using the dot technique for oil paintinga.
It's probably a big thing to set the aesthetics of manga as well. It's said that those used to rely on halftone paper to make up all the gradients. Though nowadays it can be done completely digital and the process can be omitted altogether. We do lose the chance to have unique dither patterns, though. (I mean, manual and auto dither happening at the same time would be the worst thing ever)
before I went to university I worked in an office where I was tasked with print- and digital media design and it was really confusing at first how different the color works out on these different media. Like how resolution is measured in dots per inch and stuff and how its not simply possible to translate RBG to print devices etc. now that you point it out it makes sense that some sort of dithering is being used for this...you never really think about these things normally^^
Great explanation. On the N64 the console applies a post-process filter to smooth out the dithering, making it less noticable but still can leave some artifacts if you know where to look. The same can actually be said for the original model 3Dfx Voodoo - it too applies a 4x1 anti-dither filter by default, making some textures look smeared horizontally (this can be disabled via an environment variable though, which does clean up the image at the expense of more noticable dithering).
Dithering isn't as immediately noticable on CRT since it always looks kind of dithered and the glass screen in front of the color filter kind of blends the colors slightly. However on a LED television where every pixel is indeed an individual point dithering is much more noticable.
Dithering is something we have started noticing for some years. When we were kids playing PS1 titles, we weren't able to notice, both because of our intrinsic lack of attention to details and CRT monitors. I think dithering is a great engineering trick that, at the time, made possibile the (apparently) impossible.
Composite video tends to blur pixels together so the dithering effect works really well to simulate a higher color space. But the more you are able to tell the pixels apart, the more the dithering becomes apparent.
I played Spyro for the first time a couple years ago when I started getting back into console gaming. I had just finished it when MLIG did a piece on it, and the remake was coming up in the news, etc. It really is a noteworthy game from that era. But the PS1 had *so many* to pick from. :-)
Lol I love that that you use the site I am right now for developing my PS1 title, even to this day it is a primary source of programmer gold for the PS1. Dithering was just a massively common technique back then so I think that's why it carried through to the PS1 and N64.
referral madness actually there are much more, but 24-bit RGB is reasonably close to the amount of colors and relative levels of brightness a human eye can resolve. 15 bits are very obviously insufficient.
Finally, someone straight up saying they like the flaws of an older 3D system. We hold affection for sprite-based 2D games, why not early 3D's low-poly, low-res, dithered aesthetic? One of the reasons surely that I love the DS so much is that it combines the two-it's like a portable Saturn and PSX in one.
Because like he said in the video, we couldn't see the dithering back in the day. Most people look at an old 2D sprite game and go "Yep, that's exactly what I remember". Most people look at an old 3D game and go "what's all this dithering? this isn't how it looked when I was a kid!"
Do you remember when the PS1 came out? Do you remember what the contemporary hardware was capable of? It’s not “cheaping out,” it’s about making an affordable console that didn’t also require a large chassis with active cooling. We were all playing SNES at the time, or on a PC in DOS and Windows 3.1, with software rendered 3D at the same resolution, in 256 colors. The PS1 came along with actual hardware 3D, CD audio and CD quality audio sampling, wavetable synthesis almost as good as professional synthesizers, and FMV. It was a groundbreaking system. All the others that released at or around the same time flopped because of price and/or the compromises they made. And anyway, it may have been a casualty of cost-cutting to have a 15-bit buffer (which, again, at the time, was still a pretty decent spec) and integer math (see: 486SX), and whatever else, but IMO, the compromises were entirely reasonable ones, retain the fidelity of the source data so that it’s possible to render in HQ now, and the quirks bring me back to the days of playing the PS1 when it was new and being blown away at how amazing it, and its games, were. The one time Sony went for the gold and made a console with all the hardware they could cram into it, we ended up with the launch PS3: A PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, CD player, SACD player, DVD player, Blu-ray player, memory card reader, network streamer, and Linux PC all in one - for the low low price of OMG nobody can afford this... It sat on shelves. I remember vividly. I wanted one, but couldn’t name enough games to make it worth it, and didn’t have an HD TV to make it worth buying as a BD player.
The nintendo 64 had a filter to mask out the dithering as well that mostly worked, but made the picture a tad blurrier, specially on games that tried things such as screen tinting and caused a lot of dither (starfox 64/shadow man). The 3Dfx cards also had a pretty good filter for their 15bit color output.
The N64 did have a higher color mode and also with it's limited texture cash it used colored models a lot more. A lot of times the player character in a N64 game was made up of colored objects with the only texture being the face.
Dithering is part of the PS1's charm and I wouldn't want it any other way. One thing that I did learn very recently is that early models of the PS1 (specifically the SCPH-100x models from 1995) had garish color banding *in addition* to the dithering as a result of some limitations in the GPU. A change of RAM type and a redesign of the GPU around 1996 fixed that. As it happens, I own one of those early SCPH-1002's and the banding really stood out for me when I played Soul Reaver through a Framemeister. Before that I had never really noticed it so much. Tomb Raider and Spyro also suffer quite a lot from it, though not as bad as Soul Reaver does. I guess it's just one of those quirks from the early days of 3D graphics.
I try to hide it in emulation because back in the day I didn't see it on my CRT. It was all smoothed out. So the dithering itself doesn't have any nostalgic feeling for me.
@Porfirio Rubirosa this is why i try to play ps1 games on original hardware as much as possible. I try not to be a purist because emulators mostly manage to look so much better most of the time but ps1 games just look objectively worse when emulated with "enhancements". Sadly I can't buy too many ps1 games these days without busting the bank.
@Porfirio Rubirosa On original hardware, sure. But he says the textures are stored as 24-bit. So there's no reason an emulator couldn't just use the 24-bit textured directly, without downsampling them at all. No need for dithering or banding. And, of course, if that fails, they could add an option to smooth the textures. The right kind of smoothing could even keep edges and features sharp while smoothing out the dithering.
@@NickGoblin it's not really about the hardware. You would see the dithering on like an HD TV pretty sure, not that a PS1 is meant to be played on that
@Porfirio Rubirosa If you are using RetroArch you can turn of dithering and then force the color pallette to 32 bit. Making dithering unnecessary. Although it will cause some issues when fading to inventory etc for some reason...
You summed it up perfectly mate, on a CRT via composite we never even noticed 'dithering' back then, it's only due to running a PS1 on a 'Modern Display' (which it wasn't natively designed for) is where we all notice the shortcomings.
if you used an "advanced scart cable" that had RGB output, and you had a decent enough (read; big enough) tv, you'd just see it on that screen to... especially in europe, since PAL tv's have more colors & sharpness then NTSC; though ntsc games run faster (60hz, where pal was 50hz), but i gladly give those 10fps for a much better image quality.
@@BoGy1980 To each their own, but as a proud citizen of Freedom Land having been born on the 4th of July, I'll gladly take a smoother frame rate over a higher resolution, and older consoles not looking great on newer displays without mods, and/or expensive upscalers is why I still keep my curved glass 27in Panasonic CRT from the early 00's with component input, and stereo output in the corner of my game room for retro gaming, and I will have it till it till the day it dies, and I can no longer repair it, and yes I have 3 backups being a 19in, & 24in JVC I'Art models that also have component inputs, and stereo outputs, along with a basic mid 00's Emerson(Funai rebage) 19in all in climate controlled storage of my shop to give them the best chance of lastling as long as possible.
@@BoGy1980 I never found PAL's better colors to be much of a factor for gaming. The better colors was something more attributable to purely TV and video rather than video games. Most games were built NTSC anyway and the lack of optimization, black borders and poor framerate for PAL games is just a complete deal breaker for me. Also in the sixth gen you had many NTSC games capable of running at 480p, 720i or in some cases 1080i. Which the PAL version of that game would be lucky to just get PAL60. So import games for the win for me. Sorry, but NTSC just has way too many clear advantages over PAL for PAL to even be considered equal for retro gaming. Th only time I ever consider PAL worthwhile is when there is exclusive content for that version or there is something unique about it, or it has better box art than the NTSC version (which is often the case).
@@BoGy1980 NTSC and PAL are actually quite similar, except the *P*hase *A*lternating each *L*ine part means you are less likely to get noticeable dot crawl and artifact colors. AFAIK both have the same range of colors they can display and sharpness should also be pretty similar. I'd rather have a fuzzy monochrome display than a sharp vibrant screen with horrendous 50Hz flicker. 60Hz is really the absolute minimum IMHO.
@@Katana2097 there'"s quite a difference when using the advanced scart cable (which has component RGB and you had to buy this one seperately) compared to the standard scart cable (which only has composite signal, this came with the psx as a little scartbox where you plugged in yellow (composite signal), white&red (audio) cables). for 16 bit consoles the color wasn't so much a difference, mainly sharpness, but the 32bit consoles also had better color reproduction when using component; the image is just a lot crispier
I just wanted to say thanks for the work you do. I love these videos. It's incredibly hard to find content of this quality and with this level of depth. Also, as someone who loved my softmodded og xbox, thanks for the work you did in that scene too. :)
MVG, I love these video format and breaking down the technical jargon to levels that people like myself can understand. I often watch Digital Foundry and get lost in the jargon that they use. Looking forward to more videos like these!
I love that PS1 Dithering. It's like a Virtual Canvas for games. It adds so much texture and mood to the environment and it's the reason I have fonder memories of the PS1 graphics rather than the Vaseline smeared N64 or Dreamcast ones. PS1 Dithering is Life.
Here's a fun "what-if" question: What could a triple-A studio create now on a vintage console like the PS1? Is it locked with the hardware or would new techniques and faster rigs be able to produce something far beyond what they could over 20 years ago?
Perhaps not a triple-A studio but just the amazing fans like the guy who managed to port Sonic to the GBA way better than Sega themselves did or the developers like Velez and Dibail duo who made some of the most impressive 3d games on GBA. Look up Asterix XXL gba to know what I mean. It look nearly good enough to be a ps1 launch title but it's a GBA game. Retro City Rampage also started as a demake of GTA3 for NES. Check out this video where the developer takes the final game and just show every step in shrinking it down so that it run on actual NES hardware. ruclips.net/video/Hvx4xXhZMrU/видео.html It shows an open world GTA like game back in 1985 would have been possible.
Well, to kind of answer your question - but not really tho - indie dev have been putting amazing stuff out there for retro consoles. A Brazilian guy created a port of the original Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog to the SNES. We are living an indie developer renaissance.
Better knowledge of the hardware/tools would enable them to extract a little more out of the hardware, but the bottom line is always going to be mid 90's hardware and any inherent limitations of the PS1 design. Ever hear the expression, "you can only squeeze so much blood from a stone"? Even with clever programming, there's ultimately only so much you can do on a static piece of hardware.
4:46 Small correction, the PS1 stores textures of varying bit depth, but will always use 15bit colors. 24bit CLUTs are unsupported in hardware. If a game stores textures inside the disc in 24bit depth (like MGS1), those colors need first be converted to 15bit space before being used.
I love the look of dithering on the PS1. Perhaps it’s because I’m nostalgic for the system, but it has a certain charm to it that makes me feel at home when I fire up my old console!
Sure texture warping is retro and all but playing front missiong 3 with the gte hack to make them look correct makes it so much better. FM3 really suffered a lot from that.
The dithering on the PS1, although I never knew what it was called until now, I loved it. It was a unique look for the games and MGS wouldn't be the same without that look. Great video mate. Cheers.
This reminds me of when I got an S-video cable for my PS1 back in the day. I was a late adopter of the system, but Silent Hill sold me on buying one. I remember showing off the game to my friend (with whom I'd already rented and played through the game at his house) and despite him acknowledging it looked more crisp, he also said "it kind of looks like ass." Haha, yeah, I'd already noticed the dithering at that point too. I was okay with it. =)
Some people are misunderstanding dithering and what he's saying. When using a PS1 on a regular, average CRT with the composite cable (basically what regular people used back in the day) the dithering pattern is not visible. You're not supposed to see the dithering pattern. The devs used dithering as sort of a trick to emulate more colors. Outright disabling dithering is not a solution, since it'd cause color banding which is not the intended look either. On an emulator, if you want to see the game as it was truly meant to be, set the internal color depth to 32-bit and then disable dithering. This would show the correct intended colors without banding or a visible pattern.
Damn, I always got shit on from my PSX friends that my Saturn had dithered transparency. With my knowledge nowadays I could have said "Bro, your whole screen is one big dither."
i always preferred my saturn above my psx... if people gave me such shit, i always told 'm; yeah nice for you, don't you need to buy some more hyper-priced memory cards for that console? cuz my saturn has memory in it so i don't need those memory cards..
@@BoGy1980 Memory cards are probably the one thing about old CD consoles I don't miss in modern consoles. I miss just being able to put a game in and play without downloading system updates and patches. I miss the OS not being a massive pile of stupid bloat that's more interested in trying to sell me more products and services rather than being usable and easily navigable. I miss that you could still get loads of unique games rather than almost everything trying to be a copy of a Ubisoft open world or a live service looter (yes I know indies exist, but I still miss unique big budget titles). I miss that games were made in part with fun in mind rather than solely being about how to milk as much money from players are possible. But memory cards? Screw those! Don't miss them even a little. Especially the VMU - the only thing worse than a memory card is a memory card that needs batteries.
@@BoGy1980 Nice retort. I was way too partisan and hormonal at 16 years of age for that. 😂I just knew, that they'd never had anything close to Nights Into Dreams and I always preferred Shining Force to Final Fantasy.
@@mjc0961 You never actually NEEDED the batteries for the VMU. Once plugged in all the benefits were there and there were memory cards without a screen. However you DID miss out on a few nice goodies. Tech Romancer minigames come to mind. Stop Skeletons From Fighting made a great video about those. ruclips.net/video/Rwp9Mqwu8zs/видео.html
I don't dislike the "retro 3D look" in general, but not getting younger myself I find it more stressful to my eyes so for 3D I really try to either paly on a CRT where these "features" are not as noticable or to beef-up the graphics as good as possible to get a cleaner image. I personally love 8-Bit (and maybe 16-bit) 2D graphics the most as those just never get old (xD) and I think early 3D is not aged very well. Kind of like early vector based graphics which are just stressfull to watch for a longer time. But they definetely have a certain charm to them. ...sometimes you just need to look past all the knowledge and just enjoy the games for what they are and not nit-pick on the limits of past time technology!
@@malvessidrums well I remember playing on a Gamecube and thinking 'these graphics are great but the resolution is terrible' but i couldn't put it into words like it felt foggy or not sharp and clean, but that was because we were playing on crappy CRT's at a low resolution.
FYI Antialiasing: The use of color to give the illusion of a higher resolution. Dithering: The use of resolution to give the illusion of a higher color count.
Texture warp and dithering in PS1 games resulted in such a unique visual style and atmospheric feel in many of those titles, and I absolutely love it, especially because in those days the best devs took into account these sorts of hardware-specific quirks and features when designing their games and found ways to integrate those features into their visual style. Judging by the fact that I've seen several modern PC games come out over the last few years that replicate or approximate that unique look as an artistic design choice for visual flair alone, I tend to think there's a lot of people that appreciate it.
The dithering gets interesting when playing PS1 games on the PS2. The Graphics Synthesizer had a programmable 4x4 pixel dither mask, but when running PS1 games it's programmed incorrectly with two pairs of values swapped over. This causes the pixels in two of the dither steps to align in a very noticeable way rather than being evenly spread out. From what I know, Sony never fixed this.
Fascinating, I should do an A/B comparison of some PS1 games running on PS1 and PS2 and see if I can spot that. Also, another thing that the PS2 got wrong was that transparencies on PS1 games often had a black halo around them, as if they were being blended darker than they should be. Any idea what was causing that?
@@Astfgl The black outline typically happens when you set Texture Mapping to Smooth. Where part of a texture is masked, the bilinear filtering blends in the color of the texture from the masked out area.
@@ZacabebOTG It also happens when texture mapping is not set to smooth. I never really liked the smoothing as it causes textures to break up at the edges of polygons and it doesn't look authentic, so I never turn it on. Yet the blackness on transparencies still happens.
@@Astfgl That's common with alpha blending with bilinear filtering, the colour from the transparent pixels (usually RGB 0,0,0) gets bled into the pixels with none zero alpha.
I like how there are people out there helping to simulate the PS1's effects in Unity and other game rendering engines, as well as people who worked to alter the PS1's rendering to remove effects like texture warping and eliminate the need for dithering and downsampling altogether. Work within limits, then remove them afterwards, it's all art.
Frankly on the PSP itself, not emulated or running on the PS Vita, it doesn't bother at all (me, that is), but when you move away from the 1:1 pixels at 4.3" then yeah it looks terrible, a PS Vita running Adrenaline without visual filters that simulate the PSP screen for example looks terrible in my opinion, and one reason why I don't use my Vita to replace the PSP.
Props for using Axelay theme at 8:40. Loved that game back in the days. The whole video about dithering was really interesting and I still keep a backwards compatible PS3 (original software) that I may mod just to play some PS1 games that I've been enjoying on my PC.
This is my first comment but I’ve been a fan and avid watcher of your content for a number of years. I found these insights to be fascinating. I’ve recently been combing emulation with Parsec to enjoy classic games with friends remotely. It’s been a blast. Much of what I’ve come to know of emulation is thanks to you and your channel so thank you very much. All the best.
The CGA is really a 16-color system, but with weird graphics modes. The tricks using artifact colors to get more than 16 colors work only on composite, but work on any composite display. Any modern LCD TV will display these colors just as a CRT would.
Nearly any console/PC with composite output could. On CGA many older games relied on this. This is a “feature” of NTSC television. There are games on Sega Genesis that rely on artifact color and look wrong on RGB.
I noticed dithering on the PSX back in the 90's because i'm from the UK where we had far superior SCART. The PSX's SCART output was nowhere near as good as something like the Saturn's, but dithering was still visible on a CRT with _some_ games. I never liked the PSX's image quality overall, because dithering was visible but at the same time it wasn't anywhere near as clean as the Saturn's output. Virtua Fighter 2 on Saturn with SCART on a good CRT was truly something to behold. Near PC monitor levels of sharpness being as that game also ran at a higher res than anything on PSX (higher than 480p). Also with progressive scan because of PAL, so no ugly interlaced shite like you'll see in emulators or NTSC crap. It really felt next gen back in 96, better than anything on PSX or even PC. Most people/countries wouldn't have experienced that with component + lower res NTSC. They will never understand or have any nostalgia for the superior experience that Saturn + SCART offered. Sometimes i'd start VF2 just to stare at that super crisp image.
Just tried Silent Hill on my Sony PVM and the dithering is more noticeable on composite than RGB. Well now it's on I might as well play through it again! ;-)
@Porfirio Rubirosa The first retro game I ever saw being played on a pro CRT was Zelda Link to the Past. I noticed that Link's hair was pink. Something that was not apparent at all on a regular tv.
@Porfirio Rubirosa Devs definitely used PVMs as reference displays regardless. Just look at any footage of a studio from the 90's and you'll see plenty of PVMs in use, as was the case in broadcasting, editing etc. Now it's also true that the devs would expect most customers to only use composite on consumer CRTs, but even a "consumer CRT" can mean anything from the cheapest piece of crap from the 70's with RF only to a rather nice 30" Trinitron for thousands of dollars that takes both RGB (in PAL territories at least) and component. Devs had to take into account all kinds of CRTs, not just the "average consumer CRT" which in itself is just an abstraction. The PVMs were still the reference with the best image quality. Your argument is like saying BluRays aren't "designed for" the modern $30000 OLED BVMs they're color graded and mastered on, but the $300 shit TVs that cheapskates buy on Black Friday, despite the fact that the professional mastering the movie is looking at the former for reference quality, not the latter. There's also no law that says dithering is bad; some even like it, and vastly prefer a sharp, clean RGB image with dithering over a blurry composite image with color bleeding. I don't think I've ever thought any console game from any SD CRT-centric generation look worse on a PVM than on a consumer TV, quite the contrary. The ultra sharp RGB look of the ps1 with the fat scanlines on my 800 line PVM is really as good as it gets as far as I'm concerned, not even getting into the other benefits of CRT gaming like the lowest input lag, best motion handling, support of any analogue odd timing and real and intended presentation of standard definition resolution. Consumer CRTs offer those benefit, but not as good image quality; a ps1-emulator on LCDs/OLED with 32-bit color depth will give you great image quality, but none of the other CRT benefits (I hate having to choose between 60 hz VSYNC or horrible screen tearing). In that respect, PVM/BVMs really are the best of both worlds. To add to the dithering discussion, the "composite on consumer TV"-crowd never seem to address the existence of dithered graphics on PCs and micros of the 80's onward that were very much intended for RGB/CGA/VGA displays, but still had very noticable dithering. MVG fortunately talks about this in the video, so maybe some of them will take notice. Instead of pushing for blurrier signals to mask the dithering, devs made active artistic use of it. The graphics of the Japanese computers PC-88 and PC-98 have a distinct artistic look because of this that many people admire to this day. While I don't think dithering on the ps1 was given as much care and thought, I do think the devs would be mindful of how the stock RGB signal, available for ps1 owners to use, would look on their reference PVM/BVM and a high-end consumer CRT.
I always liked the dithering and texture warping and jittery polygon movement. It's an iconic look, and I bet I could spot a PSX screenshot from a mile away.
It's actually "Blitter fill" though. The Amiga had two gfx chips, Copper for switching colors at the right scanlines and Blitter for drawing lines, filling polygons and moving bitmap gfx around.
I remember reading the PSX could do 1 million triangles a second, read it somewhere, but the magazine said the numbe drops down severely when you add textures, lighting and shadows, not to mention a target frame rate your after.
the dithering seems like it was intended with composite on a CRT in the first place, so whenever I look at native PS1 gameplay on youtube, I set the video quality to 144p in order to clean up the dithering as best as possible, this also works on sega genesis games that utilise dithering, that or leave it alone if it's composite footage.
if the dithering changed, as I want to call it, the seed per frame, it would look much more clean. part of my problem with the dithering is it's too static, and therefore much more noticeable. if the dithering was different per frame, it can more easily smooth out into a gradient.
Given that these games often render at 20 or 15 frames per second, the snow visual effect from random dither would be very noticable. Yes the video signal runs at 60 Hz (50 PAL) but the extra color information is already lost when drawing the polygon.
The PSX couldn't do that though the N64 could. Which is one of the reasons on top of the anti-aliasing, mid-mapping and bilinear filters that it doesn't appear very dithered. Even though the actual textures usually were just as if not more dithered to get around the issue of the small texture cashe.
Always love the attention to not only recalling the classics, but also taking the time to appreciate the shortcuts, optimizations and tricks both game devs and hardware makers used to make things happen... which in those times would have been an order of magnitude more awesome than what we have today. Case in point, the "Wow" factor between XBOne/PS4 to XBX/PS5 just isn't as huge as say Genesis/SNES to PS1/N64... true game-changers and paradigm-shifts for their day rather than "better than before" incremental improvements seen over the last 15-20 years. With maybe the Wii being the most recent contender. I doubt anything will match that now or in the future...
I'm pretty sure nobody actually likes dithering on LCD screens as it constitutes unnecessary noise, as that technique was mainly used to hide more noticeable graphical artefacts on CRT screens, the standard at the time.
I always try to disable this effect, because it makes my head ache, idk why, but maybe because I have slight deuterochromia and my brain circuits go wild.
PS1's GPU can't even render polygons in the 24-bit mode. And all the textures are normally palettized 4-bit or 8-bit ones, not 24-bit. 24-bit has been mostly used for FMVs and maybe static screens. Also, this kind of dithering is not that unique to the PS1, it present in most consoles of the generation that are doing a kind of blending with 24-bit math, but render into a 16-bit frame buffer. The same thing is with 3dfx.
When I went from composite to rgb I started to notice the dithering. It bothered me at first, but around the time I bought a PC with a Voodoo 3dfx. I was obviously impressed, but eventually I longed for that messy, rough look on the ps1 which gave you the illusion of so much more detail. I love emulators, but I prefer to play all my ps1 games on a crt and original hardware. Dithering, low resolution, huge pixels, texture warping, low-poly models and crt scanlines is a match made in heaven (at least for me).
I love your content, a great insight on how games where made and how the ps1 worked, looking forward to more content on how old games and engines used to work. Keep up the good work.
PlayStation dithering has a special place in my heart, I grew up on PS1, and fondly remember how amazing its graphics were compared to 16-bit games and other "32-bit" machines like 3do.
My 2cents: instead of removing dithering, can we create universal composite+CRT filter that looks nice on modern LCD? Graphics even in early 2000s were designed for CRT first. Older sprite based games are just ugly on LCD but look great on CRT.
I’m glad I stumbled upon your video. I’ve been playing PS1 games on PS3, and I wasn’t sure why it had a crosshatch pattern, especially on Silent Hill!! I had a psone, but I started gaming on PS2 really. Thanks for the info 😄
The dithering was aesthetic IMO. It was hard not to notice it on games like Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo and Rollcage. The N64 dithering was more subtle but had a muddy feel to it.
early 3d accelerators on the PC all had dithering as they only supported 15 or 16 bit framebuffers. 3dfx cards had a special filter on output that would partially blend pixels and reduce the appearance of the dithering. The dithering effects also tended to get amplified when rendering transparancy or other frame buffer blend effects. This was one big benefit of multitexturing cards. they could blend two textures on a triangle without writing to the framebufffer so there was no down conversion to 15/16 bit and no second dithering process a big visual improvement for games that multitextured like quake (as well as a big performance improvement too).
![Jack Harlow - Hello Miss Johnson [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Q86_nlRoIGw/mqdefault.jpg)
Vaguely related. We recently implemented dithering in to the hardware renderer in PCSX2, and we've had pretty much nothing but complaints from people wondering what all the noisy colours are 🤣
No surprise there, and more than likely it's coming from people who don't understand how things actually work.
@Know Thy Enemy Emulation is not suppose to make things look better, thats just something people have done. Emulation was about making software that can emulate hardware 1:1 including the bad aspects of the system.
@Know Thy Enemy as @Enigma776 said, it is intended to emulate the system as accurately as possible, you can turn it off and render in 32bit if you really want to (which is what PCSX2 has done until recently)
@Know Thy Enemy In addition to the other comments, an emulator can only do so much if a Developer found ways to do shortcuts to make their game run on actual hardware. CPU work on internal buffers for instance. Or per-game hard baked values. HD Remakes, being ports, can at least hand tweak things to account for modern graphics systems. But an emulated PS1 game can't just insert a light into the rendering pipeline that wasn't there in the game code and data.
@Know Thy Enemy it's not terrible because the textures are 32bit, so if we emulate a 32bit buffer it looks fine, though the colours look lighter (in GTA SA at least), but yes the banding looks very obvious in some games without dithering
Love these PS1 features. Can we have a video on the Atari Jaguar and why it was so difficult to program for in the future?
Terrible Coughing Is feaures the sequel to gaiares
feaures
I had recently the same idea, i think it is totally crazy to have all these powerful processors 32 and 64 bits and an old Motorola 68000 13 MHz!
Carmack said it was the main problem : Replace the 68k with another 32 bit RISC, add dynamic cache to it and give the blitter at least a small buffer. He claimed that with these changes, the Jaguar would not have matched the performance of PS1 or Saturn but would have been “competitive”.
Many other channels have covered this
I second this notion. Sure other channels may have slightly covered it, but I'd love to hear MVGs take on that matter.
When you think about it, this makes our eyes and the parts of our brain that process the input look so amazing. We're seeing and processing several million different colours every second of our waking lives like it's nothing special.
i'm not saying the brain isn't amazing, but conceptualising colours as discrete countable things is a misunderstanding of what colour is.
I love that you can tell N64 from PS1 just from how a game looks. Such unique vibes from those two consoles
Yeah I miss that. Even when it came to games. Each game in the same genre has a distinct look. Now everyone is going for realism which means everything will end up looking the same. I appreciate what Nintendo does, but I just wish their system had more power so we can see the true beauty of their games
@@p0pimp2004for sure, i think everything being made with the same engine adds to this trend.
@@marksnethkamp8633 precisely. Even with the same engine, they could make the games with their own special look. I like the hyper realism of certain games but ever game doesn't need to do this as, by default, every game will end up looking the same. A game like GEARS looks realistic but it still has a distinct style that sets it apart. I appreciate that.
Dithering is also a technique used in printing through screening. We dont mix cmyk to create new colors on paper, we just place dots of each ink beside each other so they give the illusion of more colors
Therefore, you can say screening started before electronic displays, it started when lithographic plate printing started
Heck you can even say it started when we started using the dot technique for oil paintinga.
It's also heavily relied upon in comics. It's more noticeable in older issues, due to lower print resolutions.
It's probably a big thing to set the aesthetics of manga as well. It's said that those used to rely on halftone paper to make up all the gradients. Though nowadays it can be done completely digital and the process can be omitted altogether. We do lose the chance to have unique dither patterns, though. (I mean, manual and auto dither happening at the same time would be the worst thing ever)
Techniques from the printing industry also were used for making circuit boards and microprocessors. It's really cool the overlap.
before I went to university I worked in an office where I was tasked with print- and digital media design and it was really confusing at first how different the color works out on these different media. Like how resolution is measured in dots per inch and stuff and how its not simply possible to translate RBG to print devices etc. now that you point it out it makes sense that some sort of dithering is being used for this...you never really think about these things normally^^
This is quite honestly one of the most interesting threads Ive read in a good while.
Great explanation. On the N64 the console applies a post-process filter to smooth out the dithering, making it less noticable but still can leave some artifacts if you know where to look. The same can actually be said for the original model 3Dfx Voodoo - it too applies a 4x1 anti-dither filter by default, making some textures look smeared horizontally (this can be disabled via an environment variable though, which does clean up the image at the expense of more noticable dithering).
Dithering isn't as immediately noticable on CRT since it always looks kind of dithered and the glass screen in front of the color filter kind of blends the colors slightly. However on a LED television where every pixel is indeed an individual point dithering is much more noticable.
Though cause of it's limited texture cashe the N64 used colored models a lot more.
"4 shades of gray" ... sounds like a bestseller to me! :D
Dithering is something we have started noticing for some years. When we were kids playing PS1 titles, we weren't able to notice, both because of our intrinsic lack of attention to details and CRT monitors. I think dithering is a great engineering trick that, at the time, made possibile the (apparently) impossible.
Not to contradict you, but the dithering on Metal Gear Solid was noticeable even on a CRT through composite.
@@DarthEquus it depends on the TV you used. on a cheap consumer TV with a smaller tube it was harder to spot in my experience
@@ModernVintageGamer Of course. That little 14-inch Panasonic I gamed on probably had a very good comb filter.
Reminds me of some older projects taking advantage of ghosting on monochrome LCDs to fake 3-5 bit color just by toggling pixels every frame.
Composite video tends to blur pixels together so the dithering effect works really well to simulate a higher color space. But the more you are able to tell the pixels apart, the more the dithering becomes apparent.
My gosh Spyro on a crt looks so freak'n magical, exactly like how I remembered it way back as a kid :D
Well, Spyro on a CRT on an LCD (probably)... 😉
I've been playing spyro on my crt all morning just picked up a bunch of ps1 and 2 games :D it really does stand the test of time
I played Spyro for the first time a couple years ago when I started getting back into console gaming. I had just finished it when MLIG did a piece on it, and the remake was coming up in the news, etc. It really is a noteworthy game from that era. But the PS1 had *so many* to pick from. :-)
Lol I love that that you use the site I am right now for developing my PS1 title, even to this day it is a primary source of programmer gold for the PS1. Dithering was just a massively common technique back then so I think that's why it carried through to the PS1 and N64.
Thank you! I really wanted to know why console with advertised 24 bit color had so much dithering. Great video and very thorough explanation.
Even back then, Sony was lying. These days they lie about 4K rather than color depth, but Sony, Sony never changes.
I can only show 24-bit static images or streamed video. The 3D hardware can’t render into 24.
referral madness actually there are much more, but 24-bit RGB is reasonably close to the amount of colors and relative levels of brightness a human eye can resolve. 15 bits are very obviously insufficient.
@@mjc0961 Still, over the years PlayStation delivered the most enjoyable consoles with the biggest libraries. Ps2 is still the best console imo
Lots of videos in this area mix up dithering and anti-aliasing as if they're the same thing. Great explanation here, thanks!
Finally, someone straight up saying they like the flaws of an older 3D system. We hold affection for sprite-based 2D games, why not early 3D's low-poly, low-res, dithered aesthetic? One of the reasons surely that I love the DS so much is that it combines the two-it's like a portable Saturn and PSX in one.
Because like he said in the video, we couldn't see the dithering back in the day. Most people look at an old 2D sprite game and go "Yep, that's exactly what I remember". Most people look at an old 3D game and go "what's all this dithering? this isn't how it looked when I was a kid!"
Do you remember when the PS1 came out? Do you remember what the contemporary hardware was capable of?
It’s not “cheaping out,” it’s about making an affordable console that didn’t also require a large chassis with active cooling. We were all playing SNES at the time, or on a PC in DOS and Windows 3.1, with software rendered 3D at the same resolution, in 256 colors.
The PS1 came along with actual hardware 3D, CD audio and CD quality audio sampling, wavetable synthesis almost as good as professional synthesizers, and FMV.
It was a groundbreaking system. All the others that released at or around the same time flopped because of price and/or the compromises they made.
And anyway, it may have been a casualty of cost-cutting to have a 15-bit buffer (which, again, at the time, was still a pretty decent spec) and integer math (see: 486SX), and whatever else, but IMO, the compromises were entirely reasonable ones, retain the fidelity of the source data so that it’s possible to render in HQ now, and the quirks bring me back to the days of playing the PS1 when it was new and being blown away at how amazing it, and its games, were.
The one time Sony went for the gold and made a console with all the hardware they could cram into it, we ended up with the launch PS3: A PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, CD player, SACD player, DVD player, Blu-ray player, memory card reader, network streamer, and Linux PC all in one - for the low low price of OMG nobody can afford this...
It sat on shelves. I remember vividly. I wanted one, but couldn’t name enough games to make it worth it, and didn’t have an HD TV to make it worth buying as a BD player.
@Snails40 Yeah, Kurosawa was just cheaping out by shooting in black and white. Took him way too long to switch to colour.
@Snails40 You would have probably loved deciding between a new Neo Geo AES game or your bills to pay back in the day eh?
@@nickwallette6201 This is the best post I have seen this year. People complaining probably started gaming in HD televisions.
Hey, don't think you were going to sneak Touhou music past me! Touhou 4 LLS's title screen music at the start of the video! Great taste!
Nice seeing the PC-98 games get soem love
@@mjdxp5688 It's not the first time I've heard him using PC98 Touhou music in his videos either.
Finally! Someone else noticed this! He did the same thing with the UltraHLE video.
Ultra taste!!!
The nintendo 64 had a filter to mask out the dithering as well that mostly worked, but made the picture a tad blurrier, specially on games that tried things such as screen tinting and caused a lot of dither (starfox 64/shadow man).
The 3Dfx cards also had a pretty good filter for their 15bit color output.
Yes, the 3Dfx one was pretty good. It was for the 16-bit color output, if I remember correctly (not 15).
The N64 did have a higher color mode and also with it's limited texture cash it used colored models a lot more. A lot of times the player character in a N64 game was made up of colored objects with the only texture being the face.
Dithering is part of the PS1's charm and I wouldn't want it any other way. One thing that I did learn very recently is that early models of the PS1 (specifically the SCPH-100x models from 1995) had garish color banding *in addition* to the dithering as a result of some limitations in the GPU. A change of RAM type and a redesign of the GPU around 1996 fixed that. As it happens, I own one of those early SCPH-1002's and the banding really stood out for me when I played Soul Reaver through a Framemeister. Before that I had never really noticed it so much. Tomb Raider and Spyro also suffer quite a lot from it, though not as bad as Soul Reaver does. I guess it's just one of those quirks from the early days of 3D graphics.
I try to hide it in emulation because back in the day I didn't see it on my CRT. It was all smoothed out. So the dithering itself doesn't have any nostalgic feeling for me.
@Porfirio Rubirosa this is why i try to play ps1 games on original hardware as much as possible. I try not to be a purist because emulators mostly manage to look so much better most of the time but ps1 games just look objectively worse when emulated with "enhancements". Sadly I can't buy too many ps1 games these days without busting the bank.
@Porfirio Rubirosa On original hardware, sure. But he says the textures are stored as 24-bit. So there's no reason an emulator couldn't just use the 24-bit textured directly, without downsampling them at all. No need for dithering or banding.
And, of course, if that fails, they could add an option to smooth the textures. The right kind of smoothing could even keep edges and features sharp while smoothing out the dithering.
@@NickGoblin it's not really about the hardware. You would see the dithering on like an HD TV pretty sure, not that a PS1 is meant to be played on that
@@Valientlink I understand that you can use an emulator on a CRT and it'll probably look fine but at that point it's just too much effort.
@Porfirio Rubirosa If you are using RetroArch you can turn of dithering and then force the color pallette to 32 bit. Making dithering unnecessary. Although it will cause some issues when fading to inventory etc for some reason...
You summed it up perfectly mate, on a CRT via composite we never even noticed 'dithering' back then, it's only due to running a PS1 on a 'Modern Display' (which it wasn't natively designed for) is where we all notice the shortcomings.
if you used an "advanced scart cable" that had RGB output, and you had a decent enough (read; big enough) tv, you'd just see it on that screen to... especially in europe, since PAL tv's have more colors & sharpness then NTSC; though ntsc games run faster (60hz, where pal was 50hz), but i gladly give those 10fps for a much better image quality.
@@BoGy1980 To each their own, but as a proud citizen of Freedom Land having been born on the 4th of July, I'll gladly take a smoother frame rate over a higher resolution, and older consoles not looking great on newer displays without mods, and/or expensive upscalers is why I still keep my curved glass 27in Panasonic CRT from the early 00's with component input, and stereo output in the corner of my game room for retro gaming, and I will have it till it till the day it dies, and I can no longer repair it, and yes I have 3 backups being a 19in, & 24in JVC I'Art models that also have component inputs, and stereo outputs, along with a basic mid 00's Emerson(Funai rebage) 19in all in climate controlled storage of my shop to give them the best chance of lastling as long as possible.
@@BoGy1980 I never found PAL's better colors to be much of a factor for gaming. The better colors was something more attributable to purely TV and video rather than video games. Most games were built NTSC anyway and the lack of optimization, black borders and poor framerate for PAL games is just a complete deal breaker for me.
Also in the sixth gen you had many NTSC games capable of running at 480p, 720i or in some cases 1080i. Which the PAL version of that game would be lucky to just get PAL60.
So import games for the win for me. Sorry, but NTSC just has way too many clear advantages over PAL for PAL to even be considered equal for retro gaming.
Th only time I ever consider PAL worthwhile is when there is exclusive content for that version or there is something unique about it, or it has better box art than the NTSC version (which is often the case).
@@BoGy1980 NTSC and PAL are actually quite similar, except the *P*hase *A*lternating each *L*ine part means you are less likely to get noticeable dot crawl and artifact colors. AFAIK both have the same range of colors they can display and sharpness should also be pretty similar.
I'd rather have a fuzzy monochrome display than a sharp vibrant screen with horrendous 50Hz flicker. 60Hz is really the absolute minimum IMHO.
@@Katana2097 there'"s quite a difference when using the advanced scart cable (which has component RGB and you had to buy this one seperately) compared to the standard scart cable (which only has composite signal, this came with the psx as a little scartbox where you plugged in yellow (composite signal), white&red (audio) cables). for 16 bit consoles the color wasn't so much a difference, mainly sharpness, but the 32bit consoles also had better color reproduction when using component; the image is just a lot crispier
Lotus Land Story title theme for the intro music!
I just wanted to say thanks for the work you do. I love these videos. It's incredibly hard to find content of this quality and with this level of depth. Also, as someone who loved my softmodded og xbox, thanks for the work you did in that scene too. :)
This is the kind of nerdy video I enjoy
MVG, I love these video format and breaking down the technical jargon to levels that people like myself can understand. I often watch Digital Foundry and get lost in the jargon that they use. Looking forward to more videos like these!
I love that PS1 Dithering. It's like a Virtual Canvas for games. It adds so much texture and mood to the environment and it's the reason I have fonder memories of the PS1 graphics rather than the Vaseline smeared N64 or Dreamcast ones.
PS1 Dithering is Life.
Here's a fun "what-if" question: What could a triple-A studio create now on a vintage console like the PS1? Is it locked with the hardware or would new techniques and faster rigs be able to produce something far beyond what they could over 20 years ago?
Perhaps not a triple-A studio but just the amazing fans like the guy who managed to port Sonic to the GBA way better than Sega themselves did or the developers like Velez and Dibail duo who made some of the most impressive 3d games on GBA. Look up Asterix XXL gba to know what I mean. It look nearly good enough to be a ps1 launch title but it's a GBA game.
Retro City Rampage also started as a demake of GTA3 for NES. Check out this video where the developer takes the final game and just show every step in shrinking it down so that it run on actual NES hardware. ruclips.net/video/Hvx4xXhZMrU/видео.html It shows an open world GTA like game back in 1985 would have been possible.
Look up "Death Stranding - PS1 Trailer" by Hoolopee
Well, to kind of answer your question - but not really tho - indie dev have been putting amazing stuff out there for retro consoles. A Brazilian guy created a port of the original Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog to the SNES. We are living an indie developer renaissance.
Do you mean homebrew through emulators, exploiting the power of modern rigs? This is possible.
Better knowledge of the hardware/tools would enable them to extract a little more out of the hardware, but the bottom line is always going to be mid 90's hardware and any inherent limitations of the PS1 design. Ever hear the expression, "you can only squeeze so much blood from a stone"? Even with clever programming, there's ultimately only so much you can do on a static piece of hardware.
4:46 Small correction, the PS1 stores textures of varying bit depth, but will always use 15bit colors. 24bit CLUTs are unsupported in hardware. If a game stores textures inside the disc in 24bit depth (like MGS1), those colors need first be converted to 15bit space before being used.
I love the look of dithering on the PS1. Perhaps it’s because I’m nostalgic for the system, but it has a certain charm to it that makes me feel at home when I fire up my old console!
I replayed MGS last year and it still looks amazing in design to me.
LOVE the dithering!
Ridge Raaaaaacccceerrr
"Wow what a start, this is just what I wanted to see"
"Next corner's tough, watch yourself"
"Ok, the final lap, hang in there!"
(from the other direction) "Day-TO-NAAAAAAAAA!"
Ridge Raaacerrrrrr, remember that one?
Riidge Racer....
Riiiiiiiiiiiidge Raaacer!
"Woo, that was a great corner. You must be one genius of a driver, you gotta teach me!"
Taking your time, aren't you? What's wrong, engine trouble?
Great video as always man!
Sure texture warping is retro and all but playing front missiong 3 with the gte hack to make them look correct makes it so much better. FM3 really suffered a lot from that.
The dithering on the PS1, although I never knew what it was called until now, I loved it. It was a unique look for the games and MGS wouldn't be the same without that look. Great video mate. Cheers.
This reminds me of when I got an S-video cable for my PS1 back in the day. I was a late adopter of the system, but Silent Hill sold me on buying one. I remember showing off the game to my friend (with whom I'd already rented and played through the game at his house) and despite him acknowledging it looked more crisp, he also said "it kind of looks like ass." Haha, yeah, I'd already noticed the dithering at that point too. I was okay with it. =)
Some people are misunderstanding dithering and what he's saying. When using a PS1 on a regular, average CRT with the composite cable (basically what regular people used back in the day) the dithering pattern is not visible. You're not supposed to see the dithering pattern. The devs used dithering as sort of a trick to emulate more colors.
Outright disabling dithering is not a solution, since it'd cause color banding which is not the intended look either. On an emulator, if you want to see the game as it was truly meant to be, set the internal color depth to 32-bit and then disable dithering. This would show the correct intended colors without banding or a visible pattern.
Damn, I always got shit on from my PSX friends that my Saturn had dithered transparency. With my knowledge nowadays I could have said "Bro, your whole screen is one big dither."
i always preferred my saturn above my psx... if people gave me such shit, i always told 'm; yeah nice for you, don't you need to buy some more hyper-priced memory cards for that console? cuz my saturn has memory in it so i don't need those memory cards..
@@BoGy1980 Memory cards are probably the one thing about old CD consoles I don't miss in modern consoles.
I miss just being able to put a game in and play without downloading system updates and patches. I miss the OS not being a massive pile of stupid bloat that's more interested in trying to sell me more products and services rather than being usable and easily navigable. I miss that you could still get loads of unique games rather than almost everything trying to be a copy of a Ubisoft open world or a live service looter (yes I know indies exist, but I still miss unique big budget titles). I miss that games were made in part with fun in mind rather than solely being about how to milk as much money from players are possible.
But memory cards? Screw those! Don't miss them even a little. Especially the VMU - the only thing worse than a memory card is a memory card that needs batteries.
@@BoGy1980 Nice retort. I was way too partisan and hormonal at 16 years of age for that. 😂I just knew, that they'd never had anything close to Nights Into Dreams and I always preferred Shining Force to Final Fantasy.
@@mjc0961 You never actually NEEDED the batteries for the VMU. Once plugged in all the benefits were there and there were memory cards without a screen.
However you DID miss out on a few nice goodies. Tech Romancer minigames come to mind. Stop Skeletons From Fighting made a great video about those.
ruclips.net/video/Rwp9Mqwu8zs/видео.html
@@nettack Yeah, the VMU was a fine thing, now the N64's Controller Pak on the other hand...
I love stuff like this. A question I never asked myself but once presented I'm, like, 'Yeah! Why is that!' - thanks for this!
I don't dislike the "retro 3D look" in general, but not getting younger myself I find it more stressful to my eyes so for 3D I really try to either paly on a CRT where these "features" are not as noticable or to beef-up the graphics as good as possible to get a cleaner image.
I personally love 8-Bit (and maybe 16-bit) 2D graphics the most as those just never get old (xD) and I think early 3D is not aged very well.
Kind of like early vector based graphics which are just stressfull to watch for a longer time.
But they definetely have a certain charm to them.
...sometimes you just need to look past all the knowledge and just enjoy the games for what they are and not nit-pick on the limits of past time technology!
Same here. My old ass cant stand 32bit graphics no more. It was hard enough back then
@@malvessidrums well I remember playing on a Gamecube and thinking 'these graphics are great but the resolution is terrible' but i couldn't put it into words like it felt foggy or not sharp and clean, but that was because we were playing on crappy CRT's at a low resolution.
FYI
Antialiasing: The use of color to give the illusion of a higher resolution.
Dithering: The use of resolution to give the illusion of a higher color count.
i recall twisted metal 3 having on option in the settings to turn dithering on or off.
Texture warp and dithering in PS1 games resulted in such a unique visual style and atmospheric feel in many of those titles, and I absolutely love it, especially because in those days the best devs took into account these sorts of hardware-specific quirks and features when designing their games and found ways to integrate those features into their visual style. Judging by the fact that I've seen several modern PC games come out over the last few years that replicate or approximate that unique look as an artistic design choice for visual flair alone, I tend to think there's a lot of people that appreciate it.
That old school Touhou music
pretty sure it's Shinki's theme, but I could be wrong.
The one used in the opening is the title screen for Lotus Land Story ;)
yep. Went and tracked it down after I watched, my initial thought was wrong.
Yea I was surprised. Like I go "This sounds like a 2ho music or it might be some random obscure pc98 game"
Your videos are so interesting, I think it's my favourite gaming channel now
The dithering gets interesting when playing PS1 games on the PS2. The Graphics Synthesizer had a programmable 4x4 pixel dither mask, but when running PS1 games it's programmed incorrectly with two pairs of values swapped over. This causes the pixels in two of the dither steps to align in a very noticeable way rather than being evenly spread out. From what I know, Sony never fixed this.
Fascinating, I should do an A/B comparison of some PS1 games running on PS1 and PS2 and see if I can spot that. Also, another thing that the PS2 got wrong was that transparencies on PS1 games often had a black halo around them, as if they were being blended darker than they should be. Any idea what was causing that?
@@Astfgl The black outline typically happens when you set Texture Mapping to Smooth. Where part of a texture is masked, the bilinear filtering blends in the color of the texture from the masked out area.
@@ZacabebOTG It also happens when texture mapping is not set to smooth. I never really liked the smoothing as it causes textures to break up at the edges of polygons and it doesn't look authentic, so I never turn it on. Yet the blackness on transparencies still happens.
@@Astfgl That's common with alpha blending with bilinear filtering, the colour from the transparent pixels (usually RGB 0,0,0) gets bled into the pixels with none zero alpha.
An ingenious solution to a technical limitation and part of Playstation 1's charm. Love it.
The few seconds of PC-98 Touhou made me smile.
Always love learning about the tech behind retro stuff like this. Keep up the great work!
watch in 144p to get rid of dithering
Best explanation/example of dithering I've run across. Well done.
The last thing I expected when I clicked on this video was to hear the Touhou 4 title theme.
I like how there are people out there helping to simulate the PS1's effects in Unity and other game rendering engines, as well as people who worked to alter the PS1's rendering to remove effects like texture warping and eliminate the need for dithering and downsampling altogether. Work within limits, then remove them afterwards, it's all art.
I don't mind the dithering, the PS1 graphics are great.
Don't get me wrong they were revolutionary, but the graphics do age a bit
I love how you even speak about the old systems and new... Love your extensive knowledge
When playing on crt, i am fine with it, but on a lcd (like the psp) its just bad.
Bill Gates no its beautiful
are you the real one ????
@@wphanoo of course he is
@@wphanoo would bill gates use a sony product lol (ofc he would)
Frankly on the PSP itself, not emulated or running on the PS Vita, it doesn't bother at all (me, that is), but when you move away from the 1:1 pixels at 4.3" then yeah it looks terrible, a PS Vita running Adrenaline without visual filters that simulate the PSP screen for example looks terrible in my opinion, and one reason why I don't use my Vita to replace the PSP.
Props for using Axelay theme at 8:40. Loved that game back in the days. The whole video about dithering was really interesting and I still keep a backwards compatible PS3 (original software) that I may mod just to play some PS1 games that I've been enjoying on my PC.
I just got so confused at the beginning of the video.
Is MVG into Touhou now?
I also got suprised
Not many channels push for 4k visuals, long live (and love) MVG!
dithering = "muddying the waters"
@Omne Obstat : yeah well a Turd is "JUST" a piece of excrement. Doesn't mean I want to eat one. :-)
This is my first comment but I’ve been a fan and avid watcher of your content for a number of years. I found these insights to be fascinating. I’ve recently been combing emulation with Parsec to enjoy classic games with friends remotely. It’s been a blast. Much of what I’ve come to know of emulation is thanks to you and your channel so thank you very much. All the best.
The 8bit guys showed that CGA actully could display more than 4 colors on certain screens.
The CGA is really a 16-color system, but with weird graphics modes. The tricks using artifact colors to get more than 16 colors work only on composite, but work on any composite display. Any modern LCD TV will display these colors just as a CRT would.
Nearly any console/PC with composite output could. On CGA many older games relied on this. This is a “feature” of NTSC television. There are games on Sega Genesis that rely on artifact color and look wrong on RGB.
I noticed dithering on the PSX back in the 90's because i'm from the UK where we had far superior SCART. The PSX's SCART output was nowhere near as good as something like the Saturn's, but dithering was still visible on a CRT with _some_ games. I never liked the PSX's image quality overall, because dithering was visible but at the same time it wasn't anywhere near as clean as the Saturn's output. Virtua Fighter 2 on Saturn with SCART on a good CRT was truly something to behold. Near PC monitor levels of sharpness being as that game also ran at a higher res than anything on PSX (higher than 480p). Also with progressive scan because of PAL, so no ugly interlaced shite like you'll see in emulators or NTSC crap. It really felt next gen back in 96, better than anything on PSX or even PC. Most people/countries wouldn't have experienced that with component + lower res NTSC. They will never understand or have any nostalgia for the superior experience that Saturn + SCART offered. Sometimes i'd start VF2 just to stare at that super crisp image.
Just tried Silent Hill on my Sony PVM and the dithering is more noticeable on composite than RGB. Well now it's on I might as well play through it again! ;-)
@Porfirio Rubirosa thanks for this info, I'll try it on a standard CRT. I don't mind the dithering personally
@Porfirio Rubirosa The first retro game I ever saw being played on a pro CRT was Zelda Link to the Past. I noticed that Link's hair was pink. Something that was not apparent at all on a regular tv.
@Porfirio Rubirosa Devs definitely used PVMs as reference displays regardless. Just look at any footage of a studio from the 90's and you'll see plenty of PVMs in use, as was the case in broadcasting, editing etc. Now it's also true that the devs would expect most customers to only use composite on consumer CRTs, but even a "consumer CRT" can mean anything from the cheapest piece of crap from the 70's with RF only to a rather nice 30" Trinitron for thousands of dollars that takes both RGB (in PAL territories at least) and component. Devs had to take into account all kinds of CRTs, not just the "average consumer CRT" which in itself is just an abstraction. The PVMs were still the reference with the best image quality. Your argument is like saying BluRays aren't "designed for" the modern $30000 OLED BVMs they're color graded and mastered on, but the $300 shit TVs that cheapskates buy on Black Friday, despite the fact that the professional mastering the movie is looking at the former for reference quality, not the latter.
There's also no law that says dithering is bad; some even like it, and vastly prefer a sharp, clean RGB image with dithering over a blurry composite image with color bleeding. I don't think I've ever thought any console game from any SD CRT-centric generation look worse on a PVM than on a consumer TV, quite the contrary. The ultra sharp RGB look of the ps1 with the fat scanlines on my 800 line PVM is really as good as it gets as far as I'm concerned, not even getting into the other benefits of CRT gaming like the lowest input lag, best motion handling, support of any analogue odd timing and real and intended presentation of standard definition resolution. Consumer CRTs offer those benefit, but not as good image quality; a ps1-emulator on LCDs/OLED with 32-bit color depth will give you great image quality, but none of the other CRT benefits (I hate having to choose between 60 hz VSYNC or horrible screen tearing). In that respect, PVM/BVMs really are the best of both worlds.
To add to the dithering discussion, the "composite on consumer TV"-crowd never seem to address the existence of dithered graphics on PCs and micros of the 80's onward that were very much intended for RGB/CGA/VGA displays, but still had very noticable dithering. MVG fortunately talks about this in the video, so maybe some of them will take notice. Instead of pushing for blurrier signals to mask the dithering, devs made active artistic use of it. The graphics of the Japanese computers PC-88 and PC-98 have a distinct artistic look because of this that many people admire to this day. While I don't think dithering on the ps1 was given as much care and thought, I do think the devs would be mindful of how the stock RGB signal, available for ps1 owners to use, would look on their reference PVM/BVM and a high-end consumer CRT.
I always liked the dithering and texture warping and jittery polygon movement. It's an iconic look, and I bet I could spot a PSX screenshot from a mile away.
2:17 “The Amigas custom chips could perform what was known as a COP-A-FEEL” 😰
Naughty Amiga!!!!!
Okay, okay, Copper Fill. 🤣
I thought it sounded like Copperfield lol
Robert Mcauley
I was familiar with some of the names of the Amiga custom chips, like the Copper and the Blitter, but I couldn’t let the joke slide. 😏😂
🤣🤣🤣
It's actually "Blitter fill" though. The Amiga had two gfx chips, Copper for switching colors at the right scanlines and Blitter for drawing lines, filling polygons and moving bitmap gfx around.
Peeks'n'Pokes
Makes sense, since blitter usually referred to schlepping pixels around en masse.
What did the Copper chip do?
I've seen dithering used in may DOS games as well, for example it is particularly well implemented Bullfrog's Syndicate.
And here I am, one of those weirdos that likes dithering as a style choice and it's one of the reasons PS1 games stood out to me.
Truly Mr MVG you are the best out there. Your knowledge is really unmatched. Hats off .👏🏼
I’m a new sub and I love this channel. I only wish I subbed sooner.
I remember reading the PSX could do 1 million triangles a second, read it somewhere, but the magazine said the numbe drops down severely when you add textures, lighting and shadows, not to mention a target frame rate your after.
PLEASE MAKE A VIDEO ON HISTORY OF TOUHOU, we can clearly see you love it a lot !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thumbs up for dithering. Thanks for the video. Always learning something new :)
"To dither or not to dither, that is the question."
-Hamlet
"To dither or not to dither"
-MVG
I have to say how much I appreciate your videos, they're always so full of interesting informations, thank you sir! ❤️
the dithering seems like it was intended with composite on a CRT in the first place, so whenever I look at native PS1 gameplay on youtube, I set the video quality to 144p in order to clean up the dithering as best as possible, this also works on sega genesis games that utilise dithering, that or leave it alone if it's composite footage.
When less means more. Ironic, isn't?
Awesome explanation MVG. Thank you for all the work you always do and really making this stuff simple and easy to understand.
if the dithering changed, as I want to call it, the seed per frame, it would look much more clean. part of my problem with the dithering is it's too static, and therefore much more noticeable. if the dithering was different per frame, it can more easily smooth out into a gradient.
Given that these games often render at 20 or 15 frames per second, the snow visual effect from random dither would be very noticable. Yes the video signal runs at 60 Hz (50 PAL) but the extra color information is already lost when drawing the polygon.
The PSX couldn't do that though the N64 could. Which is one of the reasons on top of the anti-aliasing, mid-mapping and bilinear filters that it doesn't appear very dithered. Even though the actual textures usually were just as if not more dithered to get around the issue of the small texture cashe.
I don’t understand most of what you say in any of your videos but I still love them.
I love dithering honestly. It’s part of video game history. Don’t forget that Saturn had it too!
Mesh transparency, yes, but not dithering as far as I remember.
Could be, I never owned one myself, so wasn’t too sure.
TH4 Title Screen theme. I see a man of culture.
I love this Dithering effect of PS1 games, it have personality and adds a distinction.
PS1 with dlss 2.0 would be killer🤤
Love your technical videos. I get excited every time you put out a new one.
I just want to say; the beard looks good.
Always love the attention to not only recalling the classics, but also taking the time to appreciate the shortcuts, optimizations and tricks both game devs and hardware makers used to make things happen... which in those times would have been an order of magnitude more awesome than what we have today.
Case in point, the "Wow" factor between XBOne/PS4 to XBX/PS5 just isn't as huge as say Genesis/SNES to PS1/N64... true game-changers and paradigm-shifts for their day rather than "better than before" incremental improvements seen over the last 15-20 years. With maybe the Wii being the most recent contender. I doubt anything will match that now or in the future...
I'm pretty sure nobody actually likes dithering on LCD screens as it constitutes unnecessary noise, as that technique was mainly used to hide more noticeable graphical artefacts on CRT screens, the standard at the time.
Seeing the dithering pattern in such clarity while playing FF VII on my Vita scratches a serious kind of visual itch- it’s a truly beautiful sight.
I always try to disable this effect, because it makes my head ache, idk why, but maybe because I have slight deuterochromia and my brain circuits go wild.
What's deteurochromia? I only know of (and could find) deuteranopia (a type of colour blindness) and heterochromia (different colours of eye irises).
You mean colorblindness? Or does it have something to do with seeing checkered patterns? My head ache when I look at small patterns :/
@@Xeotroid of course its first, are you halfwitted like I am?
@@RikiZ8 hah, colour one, I just see weird shit at some small patterns, like weird moving or stuff
Even though I do not understand the technicalities of the color scheme, still I learned a lot. Thanks MVG greetings from the Philippines
Blast Processing! No wait wrong console.
We dither! Nintendon't.
@@pibe88iTa you'll have to explain that comment for idiots like me
Sebastian Elytron me 2. I am is have stupid.
@@sebastianelytron8450 don't you find the mistery behind a comment fascinating?
I love your videos. The quality, music, and even your voice are just always top notch.
Will this guy ever run out of video ideas? He keeps outdoing himself...
displaced gamers did this video first, it isn't original
Man, your intro's always shred. You got some serious talent. Gets me psyched every time. :-D
Thanks dude. This really helped me to understand the purpose and uses of dithering.
PS1's GPU can't even render polygons in the 24-bit mode. And all the textures are normally palettized 4-bit or 8-bit ones, not 24-bit. 24-bit has been mostly used for FMVs and maybe static screens. Also, this kind of dithering is not that unique to the PS1, it present in most consoles of the generation that are doing a kind of blending with 24-bit math, but render into a 16-bit frame buffer. The same thing is with 3dfx.
When I went from composite to rgb I started to notice the dithering. It bothered me at first, but around the time I bought a PC with a Voodoo 3dfx. I was obviously impressed, but eventually I longed for that messy, rough look on the ps1 which gave you the illusion of so much more detail. I love emulators, but I prefer to play all my ps1 games on a crt and original hardware. Dithering, low resolution, huge pixels, texture warping, low-poly models and crt scanlines is a match made in heaven (at least for me).
Highly informative as usual
Man the PSOne was an awesome console. This video really brough me back, thank you.
I love your content, a great insight on how games where made and how the ps1 worked, looking forward to more content on how old games and engines used to work. Keep up the good work.
PlayStation dithering has a special place in my heart, I grew up on PS1, and fondly remember how amazing its graphics were compared to 16-bit games and other "32-bit" machines like 3do.
My 2cents: instead of removing dithering, can we create universal composite+CRT filter that looks nice on modern LCD? Graphics even in early 2000s were designed for CRT first. Older sprite based games are just ugly on LCD but look great on CRT.
Rock on a beard keep up the good work I keep on learning new things everytime
I’m glad I stumbled upon your video. I’ve been playing PS1 games on PS3, and I wasn’t sure why it had a crosshatch pattern, especially on Silent Hill!! I had a psone, but I started gaming on PS2 really. Thanks for the info 😄
The dithering was aesthetic IMO.
It was hard not to notice it on games like Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo and Rollcage.
The N64 dithering was more subtle but had a muddy feel to it.
early 3d accelerators on the PC all had dithering as they only supported 15 or 16 bit framebuffers. 3dfx cards had a special filter on output that would partially blend pixels and reduce the appearance of the dithering. The dithering effects also tended to get amplified when rendering transparancy or other frame buffer blend effects. This was one big benefit of multitexturing cards. they could blend two textures on a triangle without writing to the framebufffer so there was no down conversion to 15/16 bit and no second dithering process a big visual improvement for games that multitextured like quake (as well as a big performance improvement too).