PS1 3D, why so jittery and wobbly?

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watching a twitch stream of chrono cross, and i cannot take my eyes off of the way the 3d models and backdrops seem to pulsate and wobble as the camera pans.

does anyone know why this is? i never seemed to notice it when i was a child playing NFS III.

n64 doesn't have this problem, but that hardware was developed quite some time later.

Probably due to the low resolution and aliasing. You probably didn't notice it if you played these games back when they were cutting edge, because the best displays available were mostly standard definition cathode ray tube televisions. When played on more modern high resolution displays the low resolution becomes far more apparent.

Typical PS1 games were rendered at 320x240 or 512x480 resolution. By comparison the majority of screens today are 1920x1080 at a minimum. CRT TVs in the USA displayed at 704×480.

Actually PS1 wasn't built to be a platform for 3D games.
It lacks many features including Z-vectoring (which keeps everything stable) and other features the Nintendo 64 had.

That's why PS1 games that try to be full 3D have the wobbly and other unwanted effects.

SCEA (NA branch of PS division) purposely pursued a 3D only policy for North America for PS1 games in order to beat Nintendo 64.
Most 2D games were delayed to the tale end of PS1 life or outright banned from releasing, fearing the 2D games would make PS1 look inferior and weak to the Nintendo 64.

Obviously Nintendo and SGI built the Nintendo 64 to do full 3D graphics.

Warping polygons are one of the things that makes me nostalgic for the old PSX. I think I read it was to do with the fixed, imprecise vertex calculation which causes warping when an object's position shifts relative to the camera. But it's probably more complicated than that?

It was definitely noticeable on an old CRT; my dad still has one set up and it gets some use. It's even more noticeable if you use an emulator and increase the rendering resolution, but does anybody actually do that? It looks really bad.

Most games look much better when rendered in high resolution, particularly anything with full polygonal graphics. The majority of people running these games on emulators are running them at the native resolution of their monitor rather than at a 240 or 480 vertical resolution. Running them at their original resolution on a modern screen would generally look even worse than they did at release because these resolutions do not scale very well on modern screens.

thanks for the input guys.

3d was still quite new in 1994. wasn't around then but i bet it was still amazing.

i have read about ti before and i do think it has something to do with vertex calculations.

Unfiltered upscaling at the original resolution and aspect ratio looks fine, a lot cleaner than it does over a CRT using composite/scart but not in a way that compromises the original image imo. Actually, running at a higher resolution looks much worse to me both because it exacerbates the lower resolution textures, the aforementioned wobbly polygon issue and the more general lack of polygon detail. Running over a CRT only somewhat mitigates the pixellated appearance in my experience, and honestly that is part of the charm and nostalgia-value that I experience playing PSX games.

And yeah, I remember moving up from the Mega-Drive (aka Genesis) to a PS1. Each game was different, developers hadn't yet converged on one way of doing things so we had some completely different interpretations of old genres (eg. Crash and Spyro), some entirely new kinds of games, it was amazing at the time. The feeling of being in a cohesive 3D world rather than a level/series of levels was something I hadn't felt before, I remember being amazed (and horrified) playing Silent Hill and having the freedom to explore, it really added to the atmosphere and I think this new possibility is part of the reason why survival horror games were popular during that time. The PS1 was really the most progressive, experimental console era and probably my favourite of all time.

It was...weird. Very, very weird.
We're getting these new consoles, and console addons, that use compact discs, so there's more room for all these...weird gimmicky things. So you're getting lots of FMVs, some games that are made up entirely of FMV, games with CD audio soundtracks, weird polygon stuff that the hardware can barely handle, awful looking pre-rendered graphics, awkward "where will 3D gaming take us?" gameplay...a lot of devs didn't really know what to do with 3D, or CDs, but they knew if they made things bigger and flashier, it would sell.

Just look at Super Mario 64. When it came out, it was this huge thing that would change gaming forever...but today, it's just absurd. The first thing you do in the game is stretch Mario's face out =)

ahh, ok. i can imagine. we've come a long way since virtua fighter.

i guess one of the downsides of discs from that era is that they don't tend to preserve that well after this long. (especially if it's used by kids...) this makes me grateful for resurfacing.

do you think a similar situation is happening now with VR?

Super Mario 64 did change gaming forever. It's consistently seen as one of the most innovative and important games of its era. This consensus on the game hasn't changed over the years. It was one of the first really good 3D games that played and controlled well, with original gameplay ideas that complimented the 3D rather than shoehorning old designs, or using new technology for its own sake. It also showed the value of a gamepad thumbstick for mainstream games, which prior had only been seen for very niche applications ie. flight sims.

I'm not disputing that, I agree. It's just funny to look at it today and think "Golly, this was the future." It hasn't aged very well, I much prefer the NDS remake (or, you know, Rare's 3D platformers).

I guess it didn't help that we never owned Mario 64, so I only got to play it a few times when it was new.

yeah, i guess early 3d like SM64 has aged like milk, but personally i think majoras mask (for clear reasons) holds up much better.

ocarina of time does so as well, even without those extra 4 MB of RAM.