I rarely play anything from the past 5 years but when I do there's a noticeable difference in how the games are rendered compared to up until the early PS4 era. Transparent voluminous materials like hair or foliage have this fuzzy pixelated look to them, and there's a lot of rasterisation that looks like it's being rendered on the Sega Saturn. Then there's tons of odd shimmering going on everywhere, and I'm not sure if it's due to dynamic resolution scaling, ambient occlusion or dynamic reflections

Overall games don't look quite as sharp and defined as older games though they simultaneously have lots more detail. It's weird

  • CA0311 [they/them]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I've been playing my n64 a lot lately and its way fuzzier than I remember, maybe they are just trying to recapture that magic

    • Beaver [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      I love that era, but it's in some ways the most objectively shitty that games ever looked. Do you have an old tube TV to play it on? N64 and PS1 really do look like shit on modern TVs, unfortunately. All the raster stuff is weird looking if you don't have scan lines.

      • CA0311 [they/them]
        ·
        2 months ago

        I have a large CRT that looks pretty good but honestly still pretty fuzzy, its been years since I tried that tho so I don't know if it would be a lot better than what I have now. Then I used a really small old ass flat screen for a while that honestly looked really good, I think just because it was so small it had to look pretty sharp. It stopped working tho :(

        I have the n64 in my kitchen and use a thrift store flat screen TV I just got as both a second monitor and n64 TV. Its pretty old and has a hell of a lot of different inputs. Unfortunately the n64 looked like total shit on it... BUT I just got a s-video cable hoping it would make it a bit more bearable and at least on this TV its a huge improvement! It really fixed the image quite a bit, there's still a bit of checkerboarding with the pixels of different colours sort of hashing together instead of blurring together as they would on CRT. But its way more playable. I should try the s-video cable with the CRT sometime just for fun, but I think the reason why its such a huge improvement is mostly because the TV interpreted the composite image terribly.

        All that to say, its still fuzzy as fuck, because its an n64 lol.