It's obvious spec-wise that the N64 is the more powerful box. Devs did some really impressive things on the PSX though. One thing to consider is the support that the PSX had compared to the N64. If it were reversed, and the N64 had the support that the PSX had, imagine what types of the results devs would have gotten out of the machine. I'd imagine we would have seem some really impressive stuff (more impressive than anything ever released) that just wouldn't have been possible on PSX. The N64 simply didn't have anywhere near as many devs trying to squeeze every lost ounce of performance out it.
Storage would still limit a lot of what devs could do. For example, Crash Bandicoot used a streaming technique that allowed it to use pre-computed polygon sorting and visibility culling. One can only imagine the crazy visuals one could do on the N64 using a similar technique due to to texture filtering and higher polygon throughput (using custom/fast microcode), but alas, it would never fit a N64 cartridge because it caused each level to be a few megabytes each, some pushing over 10MBs.
You can bring Resident Evil 2 as an example of compression, but remember that a large chunk of the development time of the port was spent in compressing the game to fit into 64MBs. Not everyone would be willing to spent that much money getting around storage limitations.
Watch this video entirely
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OLTbS27oIU
If we wants to talk about impressive graphical features from a graphical standpoint we should list stuff like Soul Reaver. It may looks less impressive than FFVII battles, but at least all its features are hardcore stuff in fully esplorable 3D worlds.
That's a terrible video, why not use a
direct feed?
Also, what's that to do with anything? I'm stating a fact: the N64 cannot do additive blending. Additive blending is crucial for the visuals of things like the FF summons due to the way it causes the underlying pixels to go brighter as they accumulate, ergo, they would look worse on the N64 because you cannot reproduce those effects with alpha-blending alone.
You can verify this by looking at the DS remakes of FF3 and FF4: the DS also can only do alpha blending, no additive, and the summons/spells are more subdued as a result. They don't go anywhere as near as crazy with the particles/beams/flames:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJz8Di8VCTA (this is the iOS version, but the assets and effects are identical do the DS version)
So no, the N64 cannot do "better" transparencies than the PS1. Posting off-screen potato cam videos of 14" CRT TVs won't change that. Turok 2 has some nice faux-bright effects like the flare bow, but that only works in isolation: if you fire the flare so it overlays other transparencies like flames, you see the effect break apart.