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[Alex_Mexico]

When I find a game on the N64 that's better looking than FFIX and Chrono Cross, I'll admit that it's a more powerful console.

Until then, I'm gonna be ignorant and say that the N64 was not more powerful!

Jet Force Gemini (my pic for the best looking N64 game) looks better than FFIX and CC and without warpy polygons and zero loading screens.

Of course it came in a punt 32MB cartridge but we're talking about looks here only.

 

[Timu]

World Driver Championship is certainly one of the most graphicaly advanced games of its time.

It's dificult to explain how this game overpasses the most games of its time.

Another well crafted games on the 64 were the the almost entire Rare's library.

---

Itagaki once said this game had water graphics that only a generation ahead reached it:

I have those games...so beautiful and I can do direct feed RGB shots as well.

 

[foxuzamaki]

Im tempted to buy a N64 just to play world driver championship

 

[Talladega Knight]

Holy shit, I swear this thread was being updated just a few months ago. Almost two years have passed. Wow.

 

[dark10x]

Holy shit, I swear this thread was being updated just a few months ago. Almost two years have passed. Wow.

I'm feeling the same. Good lord time flies.

 

[DonMigs85]

Now we obsess over framerates and resolution disparities and shadow precision and anisotropic filtering rather than the unique graphical makeup of each console.

 

[BAW]

The claim that the N64 was as powerful as a Silicon Graphics computer was 100% bull though, right?

 

[The Real Abed]

The claim that the N64 was as powerful as a Silicon Graphics computer was 100% bull though, right?

Well it had a GPU co-developed by SGI. Whether it was actually as powerful as one of the giant boxes people developed the games on? Probably not.

 

[MrCunningham]

World Driver Championship is certainly one of the most graphicaly advanced games of its time.

I'm not really sure if you could really call any N64 game from 1999 the most technically advanced game of its time. By 1999 the N64 hardware was already looking rather dated, especially when the Sega was showing of Shenmue on the Dreamcast that year and Nvidia launched their first generation of Geforce graphics cards. World Driver Championship still makes really nice use of the N64 hardware and is probably one of the best looking games on the console. But most graphically advanced? That is a bit of a stretch.

N64 - block hands
DC - block fingers
PS2 - round fingers

PS2 leap > DC leap

Virtua Fighter had individual fingers back in 1993:

The claim that the N64 was as powerful as a Silicon Graphics computer was 100% bull though, right?

Apparently it was about as powerful as a single Silicon Onyx workstation. When Rare was working on Goldeneye, they were developing the game on Onyx Workstations, and they were getting much slower framerates than the game did on the final hardware. Though the N64 was still bottle necked in many ways. especially with texture bandwidth, but I think the overall polygon performance was comparable.

This Final Fantasy 6 demo that was produced by SquareSoft as a Siggraph '95 showpiece is running on a single SGI Onyx workstation in real time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPO7c_XmesU

The landscape is pretty barren, and there are only four character models on screen and a basic looking polygon castle. What you see being produced here isn't really heads and shoulders above what the N64 is capable of. I think the textures might be displayed at a higher quality and the overall image quality is still better than what the N64 can produce. But this is still a pretty close approximation of what the N64 hardware can do.

SGI Onyx workstation 's were generally used as development kits for the N64, so that statement that the N64 was as powerful as a SGI workstation wasn't 100% bull. It was. Though even in 1996, there were much more powerful workstations available from SGI than the Onyx 1. So the N64 would not have been comparable to their most state of the art workstations from that time period.

 

[ResidentDante]

I'm not really sure if you could really call any N64 game from 1999 the most technically advanced game of its time. By 1999 the N64 hardware was already looking rather dated, especially when the Sega was showing of Shenmue on the Dreamcast that year and Nvidia launched their first generation of Geforce graphics cards. World Driver Championship still makes really nice use of the N64 hardware and is probably one of the best looking games on the console. But most graphically advanced? That is a bit of a stretch.

I'd also say that Ridge Racer Type 4 is fairly on par with it too and that came out december 1998 in Japan.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

The claim that the N64 was as powerful as a Silicon Graphics computer was 100% bull though, right?

Probably, the closest thing we have is a post-mortem of the development for Shadows of the Empire:

As mentioned before, for the first nine months of Shadows, we had no real hardware with which to gauge the performance of the game—other than a rather nice Silicon Graphics ONYX. Nonetheless, when we finally received the real hardware, we were pleased to find that the performance estimates given to us by SGI proved to be very accurate. In fact, in large part due to the parallel nature of the graphics hardware, we were able to use floating-point mathematics throughout Shadows with no significant impact upon performance.

Additionally, Shadows was programmed entirely using the C language—it wasn’t necessary for us to use assembler (a first as far as I was concerned, and a pleasant surprise even though I’m a long-time hardcore assembler fan). Since our scene complexity was relatively high (usually kept to around 3,000 polygons or so, but variable according to the level type and design), the graphics task took longer to execute than the program code (that is, we were graphics-bound). Consequently, optimizations to the program code didn’t significantly improve overall performance.

That's probably not the best quote in the entire piece, but an interesting bit nonetheless as to how they transitioned their work from the workstation to N64.

--

Could someone explain what advantages the N64 had over the PS1 and Saturn in terms of lighting, particle effects and fog, stuff like that. Outside of the texture filtering and Z buffer I always thought the best looking N64 games looked "rich" in terms of how they were lit for the time. I remember being blown away in Perfect Dark by how you could shoot out individual lights and see them have a tangible effect on the environment's lighting, and how the sparks they'd give up would still light up the room in real time. Stuff like that.

 

[benjipwns]

Probably, the closest thing we have is a post-mortem of the development for Shadows of the Empire:

These old PS1/N64/DC era Postmortems on Gamasutra are always amusing to go back to. Teams of seven dudes doing everything. Lots of talk about how important culling handfuls of polygons and stuff is.

And tools! Just building the 3D levels always seems to be a major focus.

Sorry, not really related, but reading this piece reminded me of some others I read a few months ago from the era. Like Treyarch's first major job with Activision...porting Tony Hawk Pro Skater to the Dreamcast!

Now they're behind the Black Ops monster.

EDIT: Here that one is since I mentioned it, might as well find and link: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131563/postmortem_treyarchs_tony_hawks_.php

Originally, Tony Hawk for Dreamcast was envisioned as an Internet game. We planned on a staff of five or six programmers, two for the Internet end and the rest for the port itself. To get an Internet game completed in five months, we wanted to begin the networking support right away on the Playstation before the game was even up and running on the Dreamcast. The Playstation development systems had a serial port that we could send messages through, and that was all we thought we would need to take our first steps toward an Internet game.

Still, he had to go through the tedious process of finding lines that didn't compile because they referred to Playstation library calls; for every one of these he created a dummy function that did nothing but print out a debug message saying that it had been called. After a couple of days he had a program that compiled, linked, and ran -- and did nothing but print out messages.

This is the scary part of the project because there's no real way to measure how far out you are from having a running game with a character actually animating in a level. During Treyarch's Triple Play Baseball port from the Playstation to the N64 it took two months to get the game up and running, but that time we didn't have a Playstation system on hand and we weren't that familiar with the N64. We figured that since for this project we had three programmers (Sean hadn't come on board yet), a Playstation dev system, and a lot of DC familiarity, we have it running in just one month.

While Wade got the file system working, Srini and I started filling in the empty Playstation calls, trying to write only the ones used by the renderer and the physics first. Early on we decided we weren't going to use the Dreamcast's wonderful floating-point math because we didn't want to introduce errors into the code before we even had it up and running. (And besides, as slow as the Dreamcast's integer math is, it's still faster than the Playstation's.) We actually had two options when it came to the math; the Edge of Reality guys had already done floating-point math for the N64 port of the game and we were given their code. By this time (see below on our problems communicating with Neversoft), we had already implemented a lot of the functionality in integer, but we had come up against a bug and were thinking of switching to Edge of Reality's floating-point system.

Ultimately we didn't switch, and the decision seemed to pay off: our game behaved almost exactly like the Playstation version, right down to the same quirks and weird little bugs

We shipped using a hybrid version of Releases 9 and 10 which Sega didn't really approve of, but they tested the game thoroughly and passed it anyway.

Because Activision sold the rights to Crave, to obtain assets or anything else we had to ask Crave, who in turn would ask Activision, who in turn would ask Neversoft. When we would suddenly discover we were missing something, it took forever to do anything about it. For example, when we needed the raw sound files it was days before we actually got a CD with the files on it, and the CD wasn't exhaustive. We had similar problems with tools -- we never did fully understand Neversoft's Max plug-in and were limited in what we could do to improve the levels because of it -- as well as with some of the source code.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

This is ridiculous! Turbo3d is worse than Fast3d in every possible way. Yes, it has a significantly higher polygon-count, but with no perspective correction or Z-buffering, everything would look PS1-inaccurate but with more polygons, and that is NOT what anyone should want from their 3d; it's a good thing when polygons stay where they're supposed to be and you aren't seeing popping seams all the time! Nintendo did the right thing to not allow anyone to use Fast3d.


Ah, yes... I'm sure you're right, of course. But I know that developers did use overlapping polygons on the PS1 in order to cover up the popping polygon seams, and I think you see some of that in those polygon meshes. So that's two things that forced PS1 polygon counts to be significantly inflated, hiding seams and reducing texture warping.


I'll never understand how PS1 fanboys like you clearly are manage to convince themselves that perspective correction, Z-buffering, anti-aliasing, and all those things don't matter. Because what you're missing is that the N64 uses a LOT of hardware power to keep polygons where they should be, while the PS1 uses none because it can't do that. If Fast3d -- that is, the N64 microcode with none of those features -- had been allowed, N64 games would look as inaccurate as PS1 games, with texture warping and polygon popping galore, but polygon counts would be far above where they are on the PS1. Nintendo chose to require better-quality graphics instead, and it was one of the better moves they did with the system, I would say. Games look and perform better on the N64 than the PS1 because the 3d actually looks like 3d graphics, and not like a warping popping mess as it does on PS1. Just look at how many polygons developers had to waste to try to cover up the worst of the effects of those problems! And that couldn't deal with it all.

As for the RAM, RDRAM has higher latency, but very fast access during each read. It's got just as many plusses as it does minuses, and was VERY fast for the time. This is why the first revi8sions of Pentium 4 motherboards in the early 2000s require RDRAM, and why the Playstation 2 uses RDRAM for its RAM as well. Eventually DRAM got better and exceeded RDRAM, but the idea that RDRAM's slower access times actually was an overall drawback is false; in fact, it's very good RAM for the time, some of the best. It just works slightly differently.

As for textures, the N64's limited texture cache is its one real design flaw. A few of the best developers figured out how to work around this and produced amazing-looking things, but most studios couldn't match Nintendo, Rare, or Factor 5... (Some people would also complain about the lack of a dedicated sound chip in the N64, but I think N64 audio was good enough.) The idea that texture quality matters more than overall image quality, as PS1 fans always seem to insist, is wrong on any objective level. It matters, yes... but PS1 image quality matters more.


Yeah, this is misleading. While it is true that a few developers were given the ability to do their own microcode, Nintendo had to really be pushed to allow it, and very, very few third-party studios were ever given the information necessary to do their own microcode. Looking at Boss Games and Factor 5's games shows what you can do with your own microcode, but not many others managed to convince Nintendo to let them try.!

This is a great post. The games that combined good texture *design* (not necessarily texture quality) with all the benefits the N64 had hardware-wise, you get something at the very top: See Factor-5, Rare, Nintendo games (especially Animal Crossing which had amazing texture design).

As for Nintendo eschewing fast3d, I always thought Giles Goddard, who worked on Mario 64, summed up the situation best in more layman terms in this interview with N64 Magazine's Mark "Greener" Green

"The thing about the N64 was that it wasn’t particularly fast. SGI said that the ‘quality of our pixels are much better than anyone else’s’. Not a lot of people got that – for every pixel it drew, it put a lot of time and effort into it. They were nice pixels. Nicely-textured, nicely-coloured, nicely-lit, nicely anti-aliased. The PlayStation, speed-wise it was much faster, but the pixels were dreadful, there was no texturing, anti-aliasing. Blindingly fast, but the pixels just looked crap. That was SGI aimed for from the outset – the ‘Reality System’ graphics pipeline for Onyx and the Indy stuff – they were trying to compress that all down into the N64, and did a really good job. Quality of pixels over speed."

 

[TKM]

N64 RDRAM really was slow high latency though. Really can't be compared to the Direct RDRAM used on PCs and PS2.

PS2 had the best implementation; 1 chip per channel, low latency.

 

[Celine]

World Driver Championship is certainly one of the most graphicaly advanced games of its time.

WDC is indeed one of the most advanced N64 game ever from a graphical stand point.

 

[MrCunningham]

Probably, the closest thing we have is a post-mortem of the development for Shadows of the Empire:

Here's a nice write-up that goes into a few details on the development of GoldenEye: https://alexbaldwin.com/goldeneye/

Getting closer to the release date, the final platform specs were released and they had to make significant graphic cuts to make it work.

The final Nintendo 64 hardware could render polygons faster than the SGI Onyx workstations they had been using, but the game's textures had to be cut down by half. Karl Hilton explained one method of improving the game's performance: "A lot of GoldenEye is in black and white. RGB color textures cost a lot more in terms of processing power. You could do double the resolution if you used greyscale, so a lot was done like that. If I needed a bit of color, I'd add it in the vertex.

There is also an excellent GDC GoldenEye Postmortem video from 2012 featuring Martin Hollis: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-GoldenEye

He covers a lot more detail on the development on the game, including the technical issues that they had to face when working on hardware that they didn't have available to them yet.

I'd also say that Ridge Racer Type 4 is fairly on par with it too and that came out december 1998 in Japan.

Yeah Ridge Racer Type 4 was quite a good looking game as well, though they also managed to mask a lot of the console limitations with great art direction.

 

[ResidentDante]

Yeah Ridge Racer Type 4 was quite a good looking game as well, though they also managed to mask a lot of the console limitations with great art direction.

True! It's that way the WipEout games still hold up fairly well on the PS1 imo, lot's simply polygon geometry, but it's masked behind very angled futuristic buildings and spaceships, making it look "better" than what it really does. Each ship must only be a handful of polygons.

 

[misericordia]

I played just about every N64 game and I can tell you the best looking games are:

World Driver Championship
Shadowman
Turok 3 / Turok: Rage Wars

Nothing on PSX can touch them. Those three had the best blend of visual quality and framerate. I love Perfect Dark, but most all the RARE games mentioned have despicable framerates. Factor 5 was the same deal, but with very noticeable repeating textures.

Perfect Dark had those framerate issues only when running in high resolution. But Rare was smart in giving players the option of run that game in standard res.

In my opinion PD is superior than Turok games. But Turok series were well crafted too.

And Factor 5 had put on the market a game with complex geometry and distant draw distance and that was beautiful too.

I have those games...so beautiful and I can do direct feed RGB shots as well.

Oh please, give us some RGB captures!

WDC is indeed one of the most advanced N64 game ever from a graphical stand point.

Take a look at this! That is beautiful!

 

[Krejlooc]

Virtua Fighter had individual fingers back in 1993:

Virtua Racing had individual fingers back in 1992

 

[Carlius]

nothing tops zelda, conker, perfect dark, goldeneye in ps1. nothing. not even close graphcially.

 

[Portugeezer]

The 3D graphics on N64 were noticeably better.

 

[Astral Dog]

I think it was 9%

 

[ocean]

Perfect Dark had those framerate issues only when running in high resolution. But Rare was smart in giving players the option of run that game in standard res.

Even without the high resolution textures, PD (like many N64 games) runs at an unacceptably terrible frame rate. There's no way to enjoy that game unless it's emulated.

 

[MrCunningham]

Virtua Racing had individual fingers back in 1992

Well there's that too. The cockpit view in Virtua Racing was amazing for its day. Especially Virtua Racing Deluxe on the 32x. Though the driver's hands didn't have independent fingers on the model.

 

[muzzymate]

At least 32 bits.

Do the math!

 

[Pancake Mix]

Wow, almost a four year old thread, but I think the key points have been made.

N64 was generally a good deal more powerful, but barring some wizardry from Rare, you generally had to deal with a tiny texture cache, so there were limitations, just like how the PS1 was limited to such an extent that it lacked support for a z-buffer. Granted, it came out in 1994 (in Japan) instead of 1996 like the N64.

Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day are the gold standard of the fifth gen, without a doubt, and I loved Final Fantasy IX (which has also shown up in this thread). There's only so much you can do with the PS1, however, and especially since it lacked the ability to use z-buffering.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

Virtua Racing had individual fingers back in 1992

I was looking at some Banjo Kazooie gameplay and as soon as I saw Grunty's hands I was reminded of this post...welp.

https://youtu.be/MoC1ETUvITU?t=47

 

[OpinionatedCyborg]

WDC is indeed one of the most advanced N64 game ever from a graphical stand point.

Interesting. I never played it, but at the time I remember a few mags giving it poor reviews and saying it was graphically unimpressive (I think EGM gave it 5s and 6s across the board including a low score for "visuals").

e: I think I'm confusing it with another title...

e2: yup, confused with a different game... GT64

 

[Italia64]

PS1 can't stand in front of N64 in fact of 3D graphics, but it surely has other strong points that N64 doesn't have.

The best PS1 graphical achievements in terms of 3D graphics are GT and GT2, Crash Team Racing, Crash Bandicoot 3, Ridge Racer Type 4, Wipeout 3, MGS, Tekken 3, Tobal No. 2, etc.

The best genres where to check the difference between the two hardwares are free camera 3D games with huge enviroments (so not on-rail camera like Crash), and of course FPSs. In these two genres the technical gap is merciless.

You won't find on PS1 graphical achievements like Conker's Bad Fur Day, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Mickey's Speedway USA, World Driver Championship, Battle for Naboo, Rogue Squadron, All Star Baseball 99/00/01, NFL QB Club 99/00/01, ISS64/98/00, F-1 WGP and F-1 WGP2 and many others.

Not even wonder why they didn't port on PS1 games like Turok 2, Star Wars Episode 1 Racer (wich was expected to be released for PS1 but it would been too much downgraded and difficult to port) or Rush 2049.

Other examples of the N64 superiority are the great graphics games on N64 wich have a port or are available on PS1. Rayman 2, Shadow Man, Vigilante 8 or Re-Volt are very worse on PS1.

But it's hard to reply to the question "how much more powerful was N64". N64 was very much more powerful if you look Conker's Bad Fur Day for istance (read here my thoughts about CBFD technical standpoint

Spoiler

- High quality textures (probably the best of the entire 5th generation of consoles)
- Top notch draw distance, no fog, no pop-ups
- Facial, ears, fingers, foots,arms, tail, etc animations, not only during the cut-scenes but also in-gaming
- Perfect lip sync
- Real time light effects, with real time shadows, multi-layered transparencies
- Extensive particle effects system
- The impressive graphics match with a great character design and level design
- The quality of the sound is so clean (you can appreciate it in in full Dolby Surround Sound)
- More than two hours of voiced cut-scenes
- Huge sample of sound effects (also sounds change if you're in open or closed spaces, there are echoes, etc.)

CBFD shows all the advantages of the N64 hardware without compromise, in fact it also has all the advantages of the CD format: great quality sounds, hours of speech dialogues. And it also has fantastic textures and huge polygonal complexity. If the 5th gen of consoles has a king, Conker is the king (like in the game hehe).

), but not so often N64 showed his technical gap, due developers limits in economic and technical aspects. The potential gap was huge but PS1 is been surely better squeezed.

By the way, it's surely the biggest gap between home console of the same generation (considering only Nintendo, SEGA, Sony and Microsoft consoles).

 

[jett]

I'd wager Dew Prism/Threads of Fate has much nicer looking textures than Conker, technically and artistically.

Yeah DewPrism is an exceptionally good looking PS1 game, one of the best.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

I think the N64 game with the nicest textures, artistically, is Animal Forest. That was a really late game in the console's lifecycle and it shows, even if it's not the most technically impressive game out there.

But it's hard to reply to the question "how much more powerful was N64". N64 was very much more powerful if you look Conker's Bad Fur Day for istance (read here my thoughts about CBFD technical standpoint

Spoiler

- High quality textures (probably the best of the entire 5th generation of consoles)
- Top notch draw distance, no fog, no pop-ups
- Facial, ears, fingers, foots,arms, tail, etc animations, not only during the cut-scenes but also in-gaming
- Perfect lip sync
- Real time light effects, with real time shadows, multi-layered transparencies
- Extensive particle effects system
- The impressive graphics match with a great character design and level design
- The quality of the sound is so clean (you can appreciate it in in full Dolby Surround Sound)
- More than two hours of voiced cut-scenes
- Huge sample of sound effects (also sounds change if you're in open or closed spaces, there are echoes, etc.)

Spoiler

Games that generation with lipsync will never cease to amaze me. Someone posted Turok 3 in the other thread and I was literally gobsmacked. The best I'd seen beforehand was Perfect Dark's moving heads.

 

[Italia64]

Threads of Fate show a great texture work (and also the character's polygonal models are quite impressive). But like in other PS games like Crash 3 and MGS, the very good effect is helped a lot by the cameras which are often far from the surfaces. By the way in ToF there are many close-ups during the cut-scenes (which is good) and there you can check how the textures actually are seen by near. They're undoubtedly very good, clean and with a great complexity (not in MGS case), but you will see the difference.

At the other side we have Rareware games which aren't shy, they don't have fear to show all the environments in every single aspects with completely free cameras. In CBFD, BT or Perfect Dark you can find tons of poly with crispy textures, and when you see the Conker textures by near you can notice that are very smoother than ToF, and aren't blurry like other N64 games.

When you have the occasion try to notice this difference.


About the lip synch, I played (and beaten hehe) Turok 3, and the animations during cut-scenes are very well made, you can also admire hands animations ;-) unfortunately in-game animations are worst than Turok 2.

 

[Italia64]

This video shows the N64 power in good hands:

- High poly counts, I think no one PS1 game reaches this poly count.
- Great polygonal car models
- Smooth frame rate (even with 8 cars on screen)
- Not blurry at all, all is very clean
- 640x480 resolution without Expansion Pak
- No fog, almost imperceptible use of pop-ups
- Great use of lights
- Fantastic physics with four-point suspension system

A game like this is simply not possible for PS1 hardware. Play RRT4 and GT2, and after try this, it's another league.

Watch the video on 1080p. Unfortunately it's not perfect, there is flickering, it lacks in colours and definition, but it's the best WDC video on the Web.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtPEsa2jHg4

 

[dark10x]

I actually just bought a copy of WDC to cover on Digital Foundry Retro. It's very impressive indeed!

 

[Italia64]

I actually just bought a copy of WDC to cover on Digital Foundry Retro. It's very impressive indeed!

It's a pity that the best looking cars and tracks are in the second part of the game. In the beginning cars are slow and heavy, and it's difficult to understand how to drive. Once you manage to control the powerslides and the entry in the curves, the game becomes very addicting.

 

[nynt9]

Is it unfair to bring up expansion pak games in this? They add hardware capabilities after all.

As for the PS1, what it lost in graphical power it made up for with art direction I think. I can't think of games as visually striking as Vagrant Story or Final Fantasy or Silent Hill or MGS on N64. Not really related to hardware, but then again maybe it is? The texture blurriness on n64 might be a reason.

 

[Khoryos]

interruptingkanye.jpg

The Dreamcast was the most underrated console of all time.

 

[Mr Swine]

Is it unfair to bring up expansion pak games in this? They add hardware capabilities after all.

As for the PS1, what it lost in graphical power it made up for with art direction I think. I can't think of games as visually striking as Vagrant Story or Final Fantasy or Silent Hill or MGS on N64. Not really related to hardware, but then again maybe it is? The texture blurriness on n64 might be a reason.

But then you have texture warping which imho is worse than the blurr the N64 games had

 

[Italia64]

Is it unfair to bring up expansion pak games in this? They add hardware capabilities after all.

As for the PS1, what it lost in graphical power it made up for with art direction I think. I can't think of games as visually striking as Vagrant Story or Final Fantasy or Silent Hill or MGS on N64. Not really related to hardware, but then again maybe it is? The texture blurriness on n64 might be a reason.

No need to talk about Expansion Pak games, Conker's Bad Fur Day is best graphic on the system and it doesn't use the Expansion Pak. World Driver Championship too runs without EP.
In my opinion games like Perfect Dark, Majora's Mask, Conker, Tooie, etc offer better visuals not only by a graphical standpoint, the places and the environments are more beauty. But that's a very subjective thing, it's pointless debate about that, mine is just opinion sharing.

 

[Italia64]

A close-up of an HoverCrate in Perfect Dark. The texture work of this game is phenomenal!
And in this pic is not even good like actually it is seen with my eyes. Here it's slightly blurry, on CRT is sharp as a knife.

(photo made by me on my CRT)

 

[Italia64]

Conker's Bad Fur Day has the best textures of the entire generation. I never seen on PS1 this texture quality during close-ups.

If you know better textures please show me a close-up like this. I didn't played the whole PS1 library so maybe exists something better and I don't know it.
https://youtu.be/gUxlKO-Ie0c

 

[hotcyder]

All I want to know is how they managed to fit a game the size of Super Mario 64 on around an 8mb cartridge while Crash Bandicoot is about 400mb

Spoiler

I don't know how compression works

 

[Drackhorn]

While the graphics were better on the N64, the framerate for most of the game were bad and really noticeable.

I still remember Turok 2 and its dreadful frame rates.

 

[LordKasual]

Playstation had Squaresoft

so

 

[Gestault]

There were several N64 games that performed worse in the Expansion Pack's high-res mode. That drove me nuts when I finally saw a comparison. I assume it was an issue of development priorities more than an actual engineering issue, but it's still a sign of how rough framerates regularly were in the 32/64-bit era.

 

[Peltz]

Mario 64 was my first home console video game. My mind was blown. I can only imagine how amazing it was to people who had played through the NES and SNES eras.

It was like aliens came down and gave us a device that let us see the future. Totally mind blowing.

 

[Robin64]

I wonder if there's a way to remove the blurred textures on an actual N64.

Zelda would cry if you did.

 

[RAIDEN1]

There was nothing on the PS1 that could match Mario 64 and Wave-race, those where quite some graphical showcases in showing what was under the hood of the N64 so to speak..

 

[Wowfunhappy]

People really need to stop thinking about "power" as some kind of definite integer that can be measured. It's not. It depends on what the hardware is being utilized for.

The OP's question is impossible to answer.

 

[Nostremitus]

It was like aliens came down and gave us a device that let us see the future. Totally mind blowing.

My first N64 game was Star Wars SotE. I remember being blown away by the snow speeder's moving flaps and Dash Rendar's polygonal nose, lol.