For me personally, texture filtering is all about the texture resolution. Old schools low res textures - I wanna see some nice chunky pixels PS2 quality textures or higher - filtering please For me low res textures look a tad ugly with filtering, in full 3D low poly games I can't stand it. Except Half-Life, I'm okay with filtering there. On the flip side, 2000s quality and above textures look jarring without texture filtering. Imagine GTA SA or NFS MW without filtering. Heck, imagine GTA 5 without filtering. If you like texture filtering on low res textures or lack thereof on high res textures that's cool, have fun your way.
A lot of those later textures were designed with their own kinda "antialiasing" baked in, where the blending would complete the smoothed edges of details in the texture itself and create an appearance of greater resolution, so these tend to look really bad when unfiltered because you see the pixels, but the pixels represent what appears to be a blurry image, because you're looking at these "antialiased" details too close up without them being properly blended. Where stuff like original Doom, Quake, Duke3D had textures mostly without this feature, and clear edges and details were intended to be represented in the hard edges of the pixels, which filtering completely smooths away. Half Life is kinda an in-between here. I imagine they had to split the difference for people with different hardware at the time but yeah it looks pretty good either way.
My philosophy is that if the texels of each texture is hand-crafted (i.e. if it’s pixel art but for textures), then nearest neighbor is the way to go (and probably intended by the artist anyway), but if the texture is crafted without any specific care for the texels (i.e. it’s downscaled from a higher res source or taken from a photograph), then I feel more comfortable with texture filtering. I think intent/direction is more important than resolution because oftentimes PS1 games had higher resolution textures than N64 games, yet filtering looks unnatural for the former and more natural for the latter.
Whether a low-resolution texture looks better with or without filtering depends heavily on the texture in question, the game's art style, and also whether or not the texture is meant to be viewed up close or far away. I would also like to point out that Signed Distance Fields actually require filtering to function.
When playing retro games and machines, I almost always try (as much as possible, within budget and reason) to achieve an A/V experience that is the most authentic to what the average player at that time would have experienced. This usually means leaving settings on default (ESPECIALLY those under the hood) and using standard OEM equipment, so “shitty” composite cables and a CRT monitor/TV.
Love the Kirby comparison. There is definitely no single silver bullet solution for playing old games on modern screens. Some older games just relied too much on screen technology of the time to generate the desired image and we need proper CRT emulation with super low latency to see that. Modern scalers with CRT masks and HDR injection are getting close to that, but require 4k OLED or higher and for the TV to be far enough away that the emulated CRT filter looks correct and even still, it can't fully emulate how the old CRT's physically draw the image as part of the end image on the screen. It's a shame that we will likely never see new CRT's to be able to keep enjoying retro consoles in their full glory, but at least there is some modern progress on emulating it, just not in most people's budget yet.
I think there is growing community of people who are willing/want to buy new CRT and we just need to wait that someone starts a company that starts making new modern CRTs or atleast new CRT tubes. I think in realm of video games everything doesn't need to make sense since it's hobby and hobbies are ment to be enjoyment at the hearth.
@@JL1523JuhzzXxjl I would love a new CRT to be made, but unfortunately, I think new CRT's will be a tough endeavour though. My opinions as follows: 1) Coming up with a modern method of building them with safe materials might push the price of a new CRT far too high. 2) It will be tough to convince people that a 27" CRT is big enough compared to current TV trends 3) Most living spaces and current furniture won't support the heave and deep CRT 4) Most people would expect modern inputs and compatibility for the price they will pay new, but no guarantee that newer HD games and content will look correct. 5) Which technology of CRT will be chosen will cause too much debate 6) Getting the new CRT approved to modern electrical and energy standards would be difficult along with the materials used inside 7) Completely new production line and moulds required for a potentially low volume product that could drive up prices, or drive down quality 8) Issues with magnetic shielding could drive up the design and cost as well
When I was much, much younger, I recall being very impressed by 3DFX texture filtering, back when bilinear was something you just didn't see on console hardware like Sony PlayStation or Sega Saturn. That said, the filtering also completely demolished texture quality, and given those cards had a max texture size of 256x256, it made games look very blurry. I am not saying to use texture filtering is wrong but to also act like there wasn't a good reason to disable filtering is to ignore what kind of look could be achieved without it, even for hardware of the time. That said, soft vs. sharp scaling on retro gaming is a completely different debate and I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to that either. I flip flop all the time on it, depending on what system I am playing and what resolution the game displays at. 480p for instance should look razor sharp but 480i is best served soft imo, maybe with scanlines to compensate for the flickering that is associated with field-rendered graphics, like on early PS2 releases.
honestly dont worry about it. as long as you like how it looks. people are entitled to options. if i could play retro games on a crt and see them in their scanlined glory i would haha
'No texture filtering' became the new retro graphics revisionism. Most of the 3D games that came after 1996 were designed with texture filtering in mind.
so for me i like the old composite video output on most consoles (except Mega Drive/Genesis but thats because the circuit they made blurs it too much), to the point that i even use it with my Retropie (Pi3A+) and a script that switches the output to 240p from 480i when it hops into a game (even for DOSBox and Quake 2 via Yamagi). i do appreciate things that people like My Life In Gaming shows, but many people who watch and apply that seem to misunderstand it, even to the point that many still stretch their image to 16:9. Im not too much of a purist but i like my CRT vs a new display for playing these games.
You're valid for wanting filtering, so are the ones that don't. CHOICE == EVERYBODY WINS!!! For me it's do whatever the fuck you want if it feels right to ya, since you're the one playing the game not me. On the internet we gotta learn to ignore the haters and just be happy... forget about random Reddit users' opinions; they're just an image and text on a screen. You can eat pinapple on pizza, or play Doom with vertical-look, I don't care, it's just not how I would do it Personally I like crispy perfectly scaled pixels when on emulator exactly because it's an emulator, even though the correct resolution is 4:3 and dithering shouldnt be visible etc. For the console though I prefer the original composite signal because that's how it was made and I want the whole experience. TBH I don't get why people like to remove the original experience from the original hardware & make it more like the emulator... Nothing against it, it's cool that it can be done, but I just think most that do this would be just as satisfyed with a Raspberry PI and a controller adapter
I don't care if people say that is needed this filter on or off I personally like that filter in most cases As for CRT i have tried CRT tv and i didn't like the results i don't know if the reason is that fact that i connect that TV with chip adaptor on for HDMI to AV or my CRT monitor it's not good quality I have give i tried i didn't like how it looks and i continue playing old and new games on modern LCD monitor
The widespread acceptance and use (even NECESSITY) of dynamic resolution and resolution upscaling has me thinking people are not so obsessed with sharpness of graphics. Just when it comes to 2D assets.
I'm sorry, but _Half-Life_ looks so much better w/o texture filtering so I don't give a damn if it's a period correct 'intended' feature lol. The only games where I think texture filtering is desirable are N64 games (the texels on some textures are simply way too big, so filtering them becomes a necessary evil + N64's 3-point texture filtering is one of the better algorithms for it) & PS2-era games onwards. As for composite video, it's true its colour bleed was intentionally taken advantage of by developers to fake extra colours/shading & transparencies, I also think it looks perfectly lovely on a CRT, but on an LCD or OLED - w/ any upscaling algorithm (blurry or sharp) - it's a huge eyesore. I'd also add a side note that chasing a higher render resolution e.g. 4K like you mentioned isn't necessarily for 'sharpness' in the same way you talk about in the rest of the video (lower resolution content can be sharply scaled), as much as it's about resolving more in-game detail. On smaller screens that's less beneficial though, & I agree w/ your sentiment about it in that I'll always take better performance over 4K any day of the week.
I agree with you. My point in the video is that we should all be allowed to play games the way we want to and not be told that we're "playing it wrong".
@@GTXDash that sure makes sense, but there also nothing wrong in telling opinons online, no one is actually making you turn off texture filtering. i personally disable them everywhere i can. i hate how games comming out today are so blurry compared to older games. i also dont get the obsession with 4k, doesnt make the game look better.
@bacalhau_seco There's a difference between "I prefer filtering off" and "Obviously, filter off is objectivly better". I'm only taking issue with the latter.
This is a minor thing and not an attack on your broad point. However I fundamentally disagree that modern lighting and sharp pixelated textures are incompatible. In the System Shock remake, It was a deliberate stylistic choice and I think it is an extremely nice touch. The textures are not lower resolution out of any necessity. They're lower resolution as a form of stylization. There's plenty of other games which merge modern lighting techniques with lower fidelity textures. And I think it is an extremely cool style that adds a lot of character to the game. Especially in a game where photorealism is not the goal. Texture filtering would kinda ruin the intentional stylization there. And, Like, It's totally fine if you don't care for that particular art style. But it _is_ a deliberate combinastion of high resolution pixel art with modern lighting techniques.
Thank You for this reasonable and calm explanation. I'm happy that more and more people like you are appearing here to help out and calm down everyone.
Also that part where you talked about stuff being blurry when close, you might absolutely want to play the original version of Metro 2033 (not the redux version!), and without advanced DoF, maxed out, DX11, yes it's very specific and I'm sorry for that haha, but within those specific conditions, the game actually simulates the effect that you described with a shader, and it is done SO WELL, that I have never saw any game being a quarter as close of simulating it this well. Unfortunately they dropped it for Redux and Exodus to my deepest regrets, but check it out!
Man, I must be the scum of the earth because I use bilinear filtering with my emulators when the resolution is too small to fit my screen. Yeah, it's not "pixel accurate", but I also don't want squint-o-vision either.
A problem with older games in particular is that "pixel accurate" is often "experience inaccurate" anyway. A good example of what I mean by this, because of how it uses both 2D and 3D assets, is Symphony of the Night. If you play that game on original hardware hooked up to a CRT, the resolution of the 2D assets is pretty much indistinguishable from that of the 3D ones and so both blend together seamlessly. But it's really impossible to achieve that effect on a flat panel display without the use of both downsampling and filtering, and ideally also a CRT shader to help sharpen the image back up a bit. For starters the resolution of the 2D assets is obviously fixed, so you can't do anything about that. But even if you run the game at its original native resolution in order to "match" the resolution of the 3D assets, because of how flat panel displays work they end up looking far more blocky and jagged than they were originally intended to. And obviously if you increase the resolution, then the edges of the 3D objects look _too_ smooth. You can never get it to look "right".
Interestingly, I'll turn OFF filtering BECAUSE i dont want "squint-o-vision", and having it be as pixely as it was designed for helps a bit with that. Setting it up on a CRT (or finding just the right shader filter) will help too, but filtering has never worked well for me.
@@yewtewbstew547 I will say that if I do have the hardware to play the game, I will almost always play it on there first with composite cable (simply because that's all I have, and I don't really mind it), or at the very least have my PC plugged into a VGA monitor and playing the game that way. I just like seeing how the game was intended to be played, and dive myself back into a time where I wasn't even born yet. Though, if I've beaten the game at least once, I don't mind playing it again on my phone scaled-up to full screen with a bilinear filter.
I'd rather see it how the developer/artist intended. It's not so much about filtering at all, moreso at what level filtering is taking place. I'd say anything before the ps3/360 gen, texture filtering looks like ass in 3d games, it'd make more sense to blur the image itself like a CRT of the era would.
Since i discovered CRT Royale in retroarch my life has changed, is the best of both worlds for me. In old pc games it depends on the game, i dont like bilinear filtering that much, but if it is trilinear and above i will always enable it.
I do like the look some older mostly PC FPS games had where they used the blockyness to make things appear to have more roughness. It was noticeable going to opengl/3D accelerated graphics where a lot of stuff was just overly soft and without really any visible surface features. It seems at some point it just seemed extra impressive that textures could be blended, that they just went so far off in that direction and it was very aggressively used, and the hardware was too inflexible to allow selectively blending different parts of a texture. By now we're probably mostly past that, though but it took a while, but mostly just kinda "fixed" by having huge amounts of video memory more than any real improvement in that area. For 2D games I like to often be able to see the pixels, but I can appreciate that many were designed to be blurred by the analog video tech of the time.
Honestly i dont really need texture filtering when playing on a crt tv but those upscalers for retro consoles can suck a fat egg they are biggest waste of money ive ever seen
Some of us want to play retro console games on the consoles they're released for, but don't want or have space for a chunky CRT. You really do need some kind of scanline converter then, and for most modern TVs that also means upscaling the resolution so that you'll even get a picture at all.
I don't really understand the obsession with graphics to begin with. A game looking good has very little to do with graphical fidelity, and everything to do with art design, level design, and the way you use the graphics. But even in just pure fidelity, it's shadows, lighting, fog and other effects that really make a game memorable. Who gives a shit how realistic the gravel walkway looks if you zoom in with your sniper scope.
I think it's all about personal preference. I love sharp pixels, but I understand that for many games it wasn't the original intention. People are allowed to like what they like, and people who don't understand this are elitists who always want to be right and lack maturity. There is no wrong way to enjoy a game, as long as your enjoyment isn't negatively affecting the experience of others.
I honestly dont understand why no one uses cubic filtering instead of linear - like if its 2k it wont show pixels at all while at linear it would be smooth squares
Probably just me, but with the exception of Minecraft, I kinda prefer having blurry textures over blocky one. I don't mind blocky textures, but something about the blur makes it look just a little better imo. ...It's probably because I didn't grow-up with a Playstation 1
Blurry textures are very prevalent on N64 games. But I kinda like the blocky textures of MGS1 on PS1 more. Idk why but it feels nostalgic even tho I grew up with the PS2 and didn't play PS1 until much recently.
oh yea don't forget that most switch games from nintendo looks super chunky because there's no anti-aliasing at all. sure it looks sharper, but it also looks blocky because the game is being run below native res.
The following contains my opinion, which is like the most dangerous thing you could do on the internet these days lol. For me, I think filtered and unfiltered textures look their best depending on the technology, and the resolution of the textures. Sprite-based games such as Pitfall, Donkey Kong, or Doom look best unfiltered because those games had their graphics designed that way intentionally. Sprite graphics are meant to be rather blocky due to hardware limitations of the time. Most later 3D games such as Half-Life 2 look better filtered because by then textures were of a higher resolution, so blending pixels together becomes necessary. I once tried Half-Life 2 unfiltered for the fun of it, it was a pretty ugly sight in my opinion, I wouldn't recommend it. Early 3D games from the late 90's and early 2000's are in an odd place for me personally because their textures are a higher resolution than that of sprite-based games, but they're not as high as later 3D games either. Unfiltered textures results in pixels going on weird angles, and filtered textures result in everything looking extremely blurry as if somebody smeared a wet painting. I reckon it would probably look far better on a CRT monitor than on a flat panel, I'd like to pick up a CRT sometime, in the meantime though I tend to use AI upscaled texture packs which I'm fairly happy with. It works by giving an AI an original image, goes through a process of downscaling it to determine how much information is lost from the lower resolution, then uses that data to create a new larger image. I like it because it produces clean lines, it blends without smearing everything, and it preserves the original art style. I use it for games like Quake II and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I can actually read signs and bits of text more clearly. What I will say though, speaking from a preservation standpoint, I hate it when people do irreversible conversions to old consoles to make them display native HDMI or whatever. There are a limited quantity of each type of console in the world. Companies like Atari will never produce an exact 1-to-1 replica of the VCS/2600 dating back to the 1970's, and Nintendo will never produce another NES identical to those from the 80's. What's currently available in the world is all there ever will be. When somebody begins cutting out holes in the casing or swapping out the guts for something different, it's effectively destroying that system from what it was. If somebody wants to buy an old console second-hand, it's going to be increasingly more difficult to find a stock system versus one that's been meddled with. I hold the same view with classic cars as well. It may be fun to do all of these conversions but additional conversions gradually dwindle the already limited pool of base models. If one doesn't care about playing on native console hardware, it may be better for both preservation and personal convenience to buy a clone console instead, which already displays Composite or HDMI natively. Atari has come out with a mini 2600 and about a decade ago there was a system called the Retron which plays NES, SNES, and Genesis games.
Bilinear filtering sucks, however, way too often unused for old games that get their source code revisited, is bicubic filtering. Bicubic filtering is the best of both worlds, a fantastic middleground. Unfortunately it's very often unused...
Yeah I agree with the overall take here that it's not "objectively worse in all cases" or some similar blanket statement. It varies by game and ultimately it's just a matter of preference. Typically my approach with it is as follows; if it seems as though it was "intended" to be used originally, I'll use it. Otherwise, dealer's choice. And if it's on by default with no obvious option to disable it, as with games like Thief 1 & 2, Morrowind, Deus Ex, then I'll assume it was an intended design choice and just leave it alone. Now do FXAA lol.
I don'tt notice this much discussion about texture filtering nowadays. These days, people are usually talking about not stretching the image to 16:9 by any chance, which is as annoying to me, as the topic of the video is to you.
Omg pixel people... the ppl who think these games looked like pixels because they didnt grow up with crts or adults who forgot what it looked like and spend thousands on rgb mods are both annoying to me, native res on a crt or scaled native res with filters so it looks what it should all the way. thank you for this video 😂
I should also mention yah i feel that way about games that released in 720p or 1080p, like pc ports, i find they look pretty meh at resolutions way higher than their originals so often i will play them in 720/1080 scaled to 4k? sometimes with a bit of sharpness or yah yah i tune it game by game with a program called lossless scaling.
@@deathwishsquish9142 PS2 era is probably the cutoff point for me where I'm just like "fuck it, crank it to 4K+". I think games of that era and onwards mostly look fine at ultra high res. Anything before that though, at least with console based stuff, and it starts to look weird. Mostly because games before that tended to blend 3D with fixed resolution 2D assets, so if you crank the resolution up it creates a huge visual mismatch between the 3D and 2D elements.
@@yewtewbstew547 i only like ps2 at 4k if theres texture packs that correspond to it rly, if not i do either 480p or a doubling of it at 960. i dont like that 2d textures don't filter well at high resolution on those plder titles yah. that's a big part of or. not enough polygons either like ngl i think emulators need better filters by default.
You sound like smoother textures are equal to better graphics or just look better, but that's some real rigid thinking right here. Low resolution pixelated textures might have been a technical necessity back then, but they carried their own stylistic value in a way. Like modernist painters who turned away from realism to focus on color, forms and atmosphere modern faux-retro graphics bet on style insted of realism.
That's not really what the video is about. Just like a painter can get sick of people saying they're wrong for liking a certain artistic style, I get sick of people saying stuff like "blocky textures are objectively better and everyone needs to realize this fact".
I remember playing half-life in the year 1999 and wanted texture filtering, because I didn't want the games I play to look like some "old DOS game". Also, I'm sure, that if it was cheap enough, Sony and Sega would have included texture filtering in their consoles in the 90s. It simply looked better with filtering! The only reason I see for playing without filtering is to try to recreate the feeling one had many years ago , playing the games exactly as they remember it. Minecraft zoomers ruin everything and miss the whole point
I wasn't born at the time so there's no feeling I wanna recreate, but I like to keep it filterless if the game in question was made like that, be it on purpose or because of limitation, because it's true to the hardware (or sometimes software, like Doom). I believe the old CRTs would have helped filtered it somewhat still, and if I had one I would enjoy that effect very much, but since that's not what I'm using I honestly prefer not trying to fake it with a filter because I think that looks ugly, and again, prefer being true to the hardware (my monitor)
Yeah as someone else growing up with those games, filtered textures was the standard once 3D games started utiziling decicated graphics hardware. The playstation (and saturn?) were the exceptions. So for half-life and most other games at the time on PC you would really only be playing without texture filtering if you lacked capable graphics accellerator and had to use the software renderer (for HL and maybe Quake engine games you could technically turn it off with some console hackery but no one did at the time.) The very earlist 3D games like Doom, Quake 1 etc weren't designed with filtering in mind so in those cases it will look off of course but for later 90s/early 2000s games insisting on them being played no texture filtering is a bit anachronistic (outside of ps1/sega saturn). People can of course use what they prefer but don't push this anachronistic idea of what 90s 3D games looked like.
OK, here's the thing: BLURRING is bad. BLENDING is good. Bilinear and trilinear filters are BAD because they blur textures and make them look like horseshit. They don't simulate transparency, or increase perceived resolution, or add additional color information. CRT filters--especially slot/shadow masks, but aperture grilles as well--are GOOD because they blend textures rather than blur them. In doing so, they achieve everything I mentioned in my previous sentence. For this reason, PSX Tomb Raider textures on a 240p CRT TV look so much better than GLIDE mode Tomb Raider textures a modern flat screen monitor. If I were limited to a modern monitor only, I would much rather play with unfiltered textures WITHOUT bilinear, trilinear, or even cubic filters.
As for standard composite cables on retro consoles... Composite video just looks like poo to me a lot of the time... Especially when playing GameBoy Advance games on a TV via the GameBoy Player.
Technically there is no such thing as an "unfiltered texture". Reconstructing a continuous image from a grid of point samples fundamentally requires a choice of a filter; the classic blocky look achieved by reading the nearest texel corresponds to using a box filter.
Totally agree. I grind my teeth when watching a 20 year old talking about "all those chunky crisp pixels". NOBODY wanted chunky crisp pixels back in the day - including the artists. I'm glad you used Sonic as an example. There's not a single re-release of the old Sonic games that respect the artistic intent of the original games. Like you say, they were designed for video output on a shitty analogue signal on a CRT. Thank goodness for (good!) shader solutions.
nah your're wrong. i mean some people take it too far, but this video is full to the brim of bad takes and simply incorrect information (that one about being based on vision and unfiltered textures being high res, wtf was that?) anyway, people will always tell what they think is best, like you are here, and its not a crime to just disagree. idk why you feel like they are ordering you to play a certain way. i never even thought it that way, to me people are just explaining their opinion. and even if they were trying to tell me what i should do i would still probably not perceive it that way because i dont have wet toilet paper for skin. and order from someone online literally doesnt mean anything to me and therefore im not concerned by it in the least
For me personally, texture filtering is all about the texture resolution.
Old schools low res textures - I wanna see some nice chunky pixels
PS2 quality textures or higher - filtering please
For me low res textures look a tad ugly with filtering, in full 3D low poly games I can't stand it.
Except Half-Life, I'm okay with filtering there.
On the flip side, 2000s quality and above textures look jarring without texture filtering. Imagine GTA SA or NFS MW without filtering. Heck, imagine GTA 5 without filtering.
If you like texture filtering on low res textures or lack thereof on high res textures that's cool, have fun your way.
A lot of those later textures were designed with their own kinda "antialiasing" baked in, where the blending would complete the smoothed edges of details in the texture itself and create an appearance of greater resolution, so these tend to look really bad when unfiltered because you see the pixels, but the pixels represent what appears to be a blurry image, because you're looking at these "antialiased" details too close up without them being properly blended.
Where stuff like original Doom, Quake, Duke3D had textures mostly without this feature, and clear edges and details were intended to be represented in the hard edges of the pixels, which filtering completely smooths away. Half Life is kinda an in-between here. I imagine they had to split the difference for people with different hardware at the time but yeah it looks pretty good either way.
My philosophy is that if the texels of each texture is hand-crafted (i.e. if it’s pixel art but for textures), then nearest neighbor is the way to go (and probably intended by the artist anyway), but if the texture is crafted without any specific care for the texels (i.e. it’s downscaled from a higher res source or taken from a photograph), then I feel more comfortable with texture filtering. I think intent/direction is more important than resolution because oftentimes PS1 games had higher resolution textures than N64 games, yet filtering looks unnatural for the former and more natural for the latter.
Whether a low-resolution texture looks better with or without filtering depends heavily on the texture in question, the game's art style, and also whether or not the texture is meant to be viewed up close or far away.
I would also like to point out that Signed Distance Fields actually require filtering to function.
When playing retro games and machines, I almost always try (as much as possible, within budget and reason) to achieve an A/V experience that is the most authentic to what the average player at that time would have experienced. This usually means leaving settings on default (ESPECIALLY those under the hood) and using standard OEM equipment, so “shitty” composite cables and a CRT monitor/TV.
Love the Kirby comparison.
There is definitely no single silver bullet solution for playing old games on modern screens. Some older games just relied too much on screen technology of the time to generate the desired image and we need proper CRT emulation with super low latency to see that. Modern scalers with CRT masks and HDR injection are getting close to that, but require 4k OLED or higher and for the TV to be far enough away that the emulated CRT filter looks correct and even still, it can't fully emulate how the old CRT's physically draw the image as part of the end image on the screen.
It's a shame that we will likely never see new CRT's to be able to keep enjoying retro consoles in their full glory, but at least there is some modern progress on emulating it, just not in most people's budget yet.
I think there is growing community of people who are willing/want to buy new CRT and we just need to wait that someone starts a company that starts making new modern CRTs or atleast new CRT tubes. I think in realm of video games everything doesn't need to make sense since it's hobby and hobbies are ment to be enjoyment at the hearth.
@@JL1523JuhzzXxjl I would love a new CRT to be made, but unfortunately, I think new CRT's will be a tough endeavour though. My opinions as follows:
1) Coming up with a modern method of building them with safe materials might push the price of a new CRT far too high.
2) It will be tough to convince people that a 27" CRT is big enough compared to current TV trends
3) Most living spaces and current furniture won't support the heave and deep CRT
4) Most people would expect modern inputs and compatibility for the price they will pay new, but no guarantee that newer HD games and content will look correct.
5) Which technology of CRT will be chosen will cause too much debate
6) Getting the new CRT approved to modern electrical and energy standards would be difficult along with the materials used inside
7) Completely new production line and moulds required for a potentially low volume product that could drive up prices, or drive down quality
8) Issues with magnetic shielding could drive up the design and cost as well
When I was much, much younger, I recall being very impressed by 3DFX texture filtering, back when bilinear was something you just didn't see on console hardware like Sony PlayStation or Sega Saturn. That said, the filtering also completely demolished texture quality, and given those cards had a max texture size of 256x256, it made games look very blurry. I am not saying to use texture filtering is wrong but to also act like there wasn't a good reason to disable filtering is to ignore what kind of look could be achieved without it, even for hardware of the time.
That said, soft vs. sharp scaling on retro gaming is a completely different debate and I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to that either. I flip flop all the time on it, depending on what system I am playing and what resolution the game displays at. 480p for instance should look razor sharp but 480i is best served soft imo, maybe with scanlines to compensate for the flickering that is associated with field-rendered graphics, like on early PS2 releases.
honestly dont worry about it. as long as you like how it looks. people are entitled to options. if i could play retro games on a crt and see them in their scanlined glory i would haha
_Retro A/V nerds on suicide watch_
'No texture filtering' became the new retro graphics revisionism. Most of the 3D games that came after 1996 were designed with texture filtering in mind.
Compares the quake 2 remaster to the fucking N64 version
Lmfao
so for me i like the old composite video output on most consoles (except Mega Drive/Genesis but thats because the circuit they made blurs it too much), to the point that i even use it with my Retropie (Pi3A+) and a script that switches the output to 240p from 480i when it hops into a game (even for DOSBox and Quake 2 via Yamagi). i do appreciate things that people like My Life In Gaming shows, but many people who watch and apply that seem to misunderstand it, even to the point that many still stretch their image to 16:9. Im not too much of a purist but i like my CRT vs a new display for playing these games.
In the words of Joe from GameSack: "Don't stretch your 4:3 image to 16:9. Don't do it!"
You're valid for wanting filtering, so are the ones that don't. CHOICE == EVERYBODY WINS!!! For me it's do whatever the fuck you want if it feels right to ya, since you're the one playing the game not me. On the internet we gotta learn to ignore the haters and just be happy... forget about random Reddit users' opinions; they're just an image and text on a screen. You can eat pinapple on pizza, or play Doom with vertical-look, I don't care, it's just not how I would do it
Personally I like crispy perfectly scaled pixels when on emulator exactly because it's an emulator, even though the correct resolution is 4:3 and dithering shouldnt be visible etc. For the console though I prefer the original composite signal because that's how it was made and I want the whole experience. TBH I don't get why people like to remove the original experience from the original hardware & make it more like the emulator... Nothing against it, it's cool that it can be done, but I just think most that do this would be just as satisfyed with a Raspberry PI and a controller adapter
I don't care if people say that is needed this filter on or off
I personally like that filter in most cases
As for CRT i have tried CRT tv and i didn't like the results i don't know if the reason is that fact that i connect that TV with chip adaptor on for HDMI to AV or my CRT monitor it's not good quality
I have give i tried i didn't like how it looks and i continue playing old and new games on modern LCD monitor
The widespread acceptance and use (even NECESSITY) of dynamic resolution and resolution upscaling has me thinking people are not so obsessed with sharpness of graphics. Just when it comes to 2D assets.
I'm sorry, but _Half-Life_ looks so much better w/o texture filtering so I don't give a damn if it's a period correct 'intended' feature lol. The only games where I think texture filtering is desirable are N64 games (the texels on some textures are simply way too big, so filtering them becomes a necessary evil + N64's 3-point texture filtering is one of the better algorithms for it) & PS2-era games onwards. As for composite video, it's true its colour bleed was intentionally taken advantage of by developers to fake extra colours/shading & transparencies, I also think it looks perfectly lovely on a CRT, but on an LCD or OLED - w/ any upscaling algorithm (blurry or sharp) - it's a huge eyesore.
I'd also add a side note that chasing a higher render resolution e.g. 4K like you mentioned isn't necessarily for 'sharpness' in the same way you talk about in the rest of the video (lower resolution content can be sharply scaled), as much as it's about resolving more in-game detail. On smaller screens that's less beneficial though, & I agree w/ your sentiment about it in that I'll always take better performance over 4K any day of the week.
I agree with you. My point in the video is that we should all be allowed to play games the way we want to and not be told that we're "playing it wrong".
Of that there's no doubt.@@GTXDash
@@GTXDash I agree with that
@@GTXDash that sure makes sense, but there also nothing wrong in telling opinons online, no one is actually making you turn off texture filtering.
i personally disable them everywhere i can.
i hate how games comming out today are so blurry compared to older games.
i also dont get the obsession with 4k, doesnt make the game look better.
@bacalhau_seco There's a difference between "I prefer filtering off" and "Obviously, filter off is objectivly better". I'm only taking issue with the latter.
This is a minor thing and not an attack on your broad point. However I fundamentally disagree that modern lighting and sharp pixelated textures are incompatible. In the System Shock remake, It was a deliberate stylistic choice and I think it is an extremely nice touch. The textures are not lower resolution out of any necessity. They're lower resolution as a form of stylization. There's plenty of other games which merge modern lighting techniques with lower fidelity textures. And I think it is an extremely cool style that adds a lot of character to the game. Especially in a game where photorealism is not the goal.
Texture filtering would kinda ruin the intentional stylization there. And, Like, It's totally fine if you don't care for that particular art style. But it _is_ a deliberate combinastion of high resolution pixel art with modern lighting techniques.
Thank You for this reasonable and calm explanation.
I'm happy that more and more people like you are appearing here to help out and calm down everyone.
Also that part where you talked about stuff being blurry when close, you might absolutely want to play the original version of Metro 2033 (not the redux version!), and without advanced DoF, maxed out, DX11, yes it's very specific and I'm sorry for that haha, but within those specific conditions, the game actually simulates the effect that you described with a shader, and it is done SO WELL, that I have never saw any game being a quarter as close of simulating it this well. Unfortunately they dropped it for Redux and Exodus to my deepest regrets, but check it out!
Man, I must be the scum of the earth because I use bilinear filtering with my emulators when the resolution is too small to fit my screen.
Yeah, it's not "pixel accurate", but I also don't want squint-o-vision either.
A problem with older games in particular is that "pixel accurate" is often "experience inaccurate" anyway. A good example of what I mean by this, because of how it uses both 2D and 3D assets, is Symphony of the Night. If you play that game on original hardware hooked up to a CRT, the resolution of the 2D assets is pretty much indistinguishable from that of the 3D ones and so both blend together seamlessly. But it's really impossible to achieve that effect on a flat panel display without the use of both downsampling and filtering, and ideally also a CRT shader to help sharpen the image back up a bit.
For starters the resolution of the 2D assets is obviously fixed, so you can't do anything about that. But even if you run the game at its original native resolution in order to "match" the resolution of the 3D assets, because of how flat panel displays work they end up looking far more blocky and jagged than they were originally intended to. And obviously if you increase the resolution, then the edges of the 3D objects look _too_ smooth. You can never get it to look "right".
Interestingly, I'll turn OFF filtering BECAUSE i dont want "squint-o-vision", and having it be as pixely as it was designed for helps a bit with that. Setting it up on a CRT (or finding just the right shader filter) will help too, but filtering has never worked well for me.
@@yewtewbstew547
I will say that if I do have the hardware to play the game, I will almost always play it on there first with composite cable (simply because that's all I have, and I don't really mind it), or at the very least have my PC plugged into a VGA monitor and playing the game that way. I just like seeing how the game was intended to be played, and dive myself back into a time where I wasn't even born yet.
Though, if I've beaten the game at least once, I don't mind playing it again on my phone scaled-up to full screen with a bilinear filter.
I'd rather see it how the developer/artist intended. It's not so much about filtering at all, moreso at what level filtering is taking place. I'd say anything before the ps3/360 gen, texture filtering looks like ass in 3d games, it'd make more sense to blur the image itself like a CRT of the era would.
Since i discovered CRT Royale in retroarch my life has changed, is the best of both worlds for me. In old pc games it depends on the game, i dont like bilinear filtering that much, but if it is trilinear and above i will always enable it.
3:44
flashbang!
I do like the look some older mostly PC FPS games had where they used the blockyness to make things appear to have more roughness. It was noticeable going to opengl/3D accelerated graphics where a lot of stuff was just overly soft and without really any visible surface features. It seems at some point it just seemed extra impressive that textures could be blended, that they just went so far off in that direction and it was very aggressively used, and the hardware was too inflexible to allow selectively blending different parts of a texture. By now we're probably mostly past that, though but it took a while, but mostly just kinda "fixed" by having huge amounts of video memory more than any real improvement in that area.
For 2D games I like to often be able to see the pixels, but I can appreciate that many were designed to be blurred by the analog video tech of the time.
Honestly i dont really need texture filtering when playing on a crt tv but those upscalers for retro consoles can suck a fat egg they are biggest waste of money ive ever seen
Some of us want to play retro console games on the consoles they're released for, but don't want or have space for a chunky CRT. You really do need some kind of scanline converter then, and for most modern TVs that also means upscaling the resolution so that you'll even get a picture at all.
I don't really understand the obsession with graphics to begin with. A game looking good has very little to do with graphical fidelity, and everything to do with art design, level design, and the way you use the graphics.
But even in just pure fidelity, it's shadows, lighting, fog and other effects that really make a game memorable. Who gives a shit how realistic the gravel walkway looks if you zoom in with your sniper scope.
Everything is about resolution. Low res textures/sprites looks better without filtering and high res looks better filtered.
Also never stretch, always upscale in integer steps, etc etc 🙄
yay! new mxdash vid!
I think it's all about personal preference. I love sharp pixels, but I understand that for many games it wasn't the original intention. People are allowed to like what they like, and people who don't understand this are elitists who always want to be right and lack maturity. There is no wrong way to enjoy a game, as long as your enjoyment isn't negatively affecting the experience of others.
Right answer
I honestly dont understand why no one uses cubic filtering instead of linear - like if its 2k it wont show pixels at all while at linear it would be smooth squares
That thing about System Shock remake really did put me off as well. Like, why?
Probably just me, but with the exception of Minecraft, I kinda prefer having blurry textures over blocky one. I don't mind blocky textures, but something about the blur makes it look just a little better imo.
...It's probably because I didn't grow-up with a Playstation 1
Blurry textures are very prevalent on N64 games. But I kinda like the blocky textures of MGS1 on PS1 more. Idk why but it feels nostalgic even tho I grew up with the PS2 and didn't play PS1 until much recently.
oh yea don't forget that most switch games from nintendo looks super chunky because there's no anti-aliasing at all. sure it looks sharper, but it also looks blocky because the game is being run below native res.
The following contains my opinion, which is like the most dangerous thing you could do on the internet these days lol.
For me, I think filtered and unfiltered textures look their best depending on the technology, and the resolution of the textures. Sprite-based games such as Pitfall, Donkey Kong, or Doom look best unfiltered because those games had their graphics designed that way intentionally. Sprite graphics are meant to be rather blocky due to hardware limitations of the time. Most later 3D games such as Half-Life 2 look better filtered because by then textures were of a higher resolution, so blending pixels together becomes necessary. I once tried Half-Life 2 unfiltered for the fun of it, it was a pretty ugly sight in my opinion, I wouldn't recommend it. Early 3D games from the late 90's and early 2000's are in an odd place for me personally because their textures are a higher resolution than that of sprite-based games, but they're not as high as later 3D games either. Unfiltered textures results in pixels going on weird angles, and filtered textures result in everything looking extremely blurry as if somebody smeared a wet painting. I reckon it would probably look far better on a CRT monitor than on a flat panel, I'd like to pick up a CRT sometime, in the meantime though I tend to use AI upscaled texture packs which I'm fairly happy with. It works by giving an AI an original image, goes through a process of downscaling it to determine how much information is lost from the lower resolution, then uses that data to create a new larger image. I like it because it produces clean lines, it blends without smearing everything, and it preserves the original art style. I use it for games like Quake II and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I can actually read signs and bits of text more clearly.
What I will say though, speaking from a preservation standpoint, I hate it when people do irreversible conversions to old consoles to make them display native HDMI or whatever. There are a limited quantity of each type of console in the world. Companies like Atari will never produce an exact 1-to-1 replica of the VCS/2600 dating back to the 1970's, and Nintendo will never produce another NES identical to those from the 80's. What's currently available in the world is all there ever will be. When somebody begins cutting out holes in the casing or swapping out the guts for something different, it's effectively destroying that system from what it was. If somebody wants to buy an old console second-hand, it's going to be increasingly more difficult to find a stock system versus one that's been meddled with. I hold the same view with classic cars as well. It may be fun to do all of these conversions but additional conversions gradually dwindle the already limited pool of base models. If one doesn't care about playing on native console hardware, it may be better for both preservation and personal convenience to buy a clone console instead, which already displays Composite or HDMI natively. Atari has come out with a mini 2600 and about a decade ago there was a system called the Retron which plays NES, SNES, and Genesis games.
Bilinear filtering sucks, however, way too often unused for old games that get their source code revisited, is bicubic filtering. Bicubic filtering is the best of both worlds, a fantastic middleground. Unfortunately it's very often unused...
good vid but can you disable texture filtering on the gameplay
Yeah I agree with the overall take here that it's not "objectively worse in all cases" or some similar blanket statement. It varies by game and ultimately it's just a matter of preference. Typically my approach with it is as follows; if it seems as though it was "intended" to be used originally, I'll use it. Otherwise, dealer's choice. And if it's on by default with no obvious option to disable it, as with games like Thief 1 & 2, Morrowind, Deus Ex, then I'll assume it was an intended design choice and just leave it alone.
Now do FXAA lol.
the quake arena type game in the video looks fun
i wanna see how minecraft looks with texture filtering
Probably terrible 😄. Minecraft fully embraces the blocky athsetic.
I don'tt notice this much discussion about texture filtering nowadays. These days, people are usually talking about not stretching the image to 16:9 by any chance, which is as annoying to me, as the topic of the video is to you.
The System Shock remaster looks amazing. Thanks for letting me know what the setting is so I can turn it off in all my games! ❤
Here, here!
I like them both. :)
Right answer.
Omg pixel people... the ppl who think these games looked like pixels because they didnt grow up with crts or adults who forgot what it looked like and spend thousands on rgb mods are both annoying to me, native res on a crt or scaled native res with filters so it looks what it should all the way.
thank you for this video 😂
I should also mention yah i feel that way about games that released in 720p or 1080p, like pc ports, i find they look pretty meh at resolutions way higher than their originals so often i will play them in 720/1080 scaled to 4k? sometimes with a bit of sharpness or yah yah i tune it game by game with a program called lossless scaling.
@@deathwishsquish9142 PS2 era is probably the cutoff point for me where I'm just like "fuck it, crank it to 4K+". I think games of that era and onwards mostly look fine at ultra high res. Anything before that though, at least with console based stuff, and it starts to look weird. Mostly because games before that tended to blend 3D with fixed resolution 2D assets, so if you crank the resolution up it creates a huge visual mismatch between the 3D and 2D elements.
@@yewtewbstew547 i only like ps2 at 4k if theres texture packs that correspond to it rly, if not i do either 480p or a doubling of it at 960. i dont like that 2d textures don't filter well at high resolution on those plder titles yah. that's a big part of or. not enough polygons either like ngl i think emulators need better filters by default.
You sound like smoother textures are equal to better graphics or just look better, but that's some real rigid thinking right here. Low resolution pixelated textures might have been a technical necessity back then, but they carried their own stylistic value in a way. Like modernist painters who turned away from realism to focus on color, forms and atmosphere modern faux-retro graphics bet on style insted of realism.
That's not really what the video is about. Just like a painter can get sick of people saying they're wrong for liking a certain artistic style, I get sick of people saying stuff like "blocky textures are objectively better and everyone needs to realize this fact".
I remember playing half-life in the year 1999 and wanted texture filtering, because I didn't want the games I play to look like some "old DOS game". Also, I'm sure, that if it was cheap enough, Sony and Sega would have included texture filtering in their consoles in the 90s. It simply looked better with filtering!
The only reason I see for playing without filtering is to try to recreate the feeling one had many years ago , playing the games exactly as they remember it.
Minecraft zoomers ruin everything and miss the whole point
I wasn't born at the time so there's no feeling I wanna recreate, but I like to keep it filterless if the game in question was made like that, be it on purpose or because of limitation, because it's true to the hardware (or sometimes software, like Doom). I believe the old CRTs would have helped filtered it somewhat still, and if I had one I would enjoy that effect very much, but since that's not what I'm using I honestly prefer not trying to fake it with a filter because I think that looks ugly, and again, prefer being true to the hardware (my monitor)
Yeah as someone else growing up with those games, filtered textures was the standard once 3D games started utiziling decicated graphics hardware. The playstation (and saturn?) were the exceptions. So for half-life and most other games at the time on PC you would really only be playing without texture filtering if you lacked capable graphics accellerator and had to use the software renderer (for HL and maybe Quake engine games you could technically turn it off with some console hackery but no one did at the time.) The very earlist 3D games like Doom, Quake 1 etc weren't designed with filtering in mind so in those cases it will look off of course but for later 90s/early 2000s games insisting on them being played no texture filtering is a bit anachronistic (outside of ps1/sega saturn). People can of course use what they prefer but don't push this anachronistic idea of what 90s 3D games looked like.
OK, here's the thing: BLURRING is bad. BLENDING is good. Bilinear and trilinear filters are BAD because they blur textures and make them look like horseshit. They don't simulate transparency, or increase perceived resolution, or add additional color information. CRT filters--especially slot/shadow masks, but aperture grilles as well--are GOOD because they blend textures rather than blur them. In doing so, they achieve everything I mentioned in my previous sentence. For this reason, PSX Tomb Raider textures on a 240p CRT TV look so much better than GLIDE mode Tomb Raider textures a modern flat screen monitor. If I were limited to a modern monitor only, I would much rather play with unfiltered textures WITHOUT bilinear, trilinear, or even cubic filters.
As for standard composite cables on retro consoles...
Composite video just looks like poo to me a lot of the time... Especially when playing GameBoy Advance games on a TV via the GameBoy Player.
Technically there is no such thing as an "unfiltered texture". Reconstructing a continuous image from a grid of point samples fundamentally requires a choice of a filter; the classic blocky look achieved by reading the nearest texel corresponds to using a box filter.
Yes bro, earned a sub for speaking the truth.
Retro gaming is just better on CRTs
Totally agree. I grind my teeth when watching a 20 year old talking about "all those chunky crisp pixels". NOBODY wanted chunky crisp pixels back in the day - including the artists. I'm glad you used Sonic as an example. There's not a single re-release of the old Sonic games that respect the artistic intent of the original games. Like you say, they were designed for video output on a shitty analogue signal on a CRT. Thank goodness for (good!) shader solutions.
If you eat pineapple pizzas then your opinion is unworthy.
😁🍍🍕
Quake 2 has very low resolution on doors and crates. They look extremely ugly with filtering.
The truth is Quake 2 has always been an ugly game. Even when it came out it felt dated, both visually and gameplay-wise.
SA represent.
yeah they are lol
*_Yes they freaking are???_*
nah your're wrong. i mean some people take it too far, but this video is full to the brim of bad takes and simply incorrect information (that one about being based on vision and unfiltered textures being high res, wtf was that?)
anyway, people will always tell what they think is best, like you are here, and its not a crime to just disagree. idk why you feel like they are ordering you to play a certain way. i never even thought it that way, to me people are just explaining their opinion. and even if they were trying to tell me what i should do i would still probably not perceive it that way because i dont have wet toilet paper for skin. and order from someone online literally doesnt mean anything to me and therefore im not concerned by it in the least
Wrong and subjectivity are at odds with each other.
I think you are crazy
nice clickbait title
Is the video not what the title entails?
Fair enough, I don't like when someone tells me how I "should" play games either.