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Comment by M4v3R | Hacker News Reader

I have fond memories of playing Quake 2 for some time and then buying a Voodoo card. It suddenly looked like a totally different game. It wasn’t just the resolution and texture filtering - Quake 2 in GL mode used a totally different, dynamic lightning system and back then it was simply stunning.

Comparison pics: https://www.marky.ca/3d/quake2/compare/content.html

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I...totally prefer the SVGA "lower resolution" version, and I remember feeling like that at the time too.

The problem was the 3D version looked/looks just plain BLURRY.

Something about my brain is able to understand when they see a pixelated video game that it's an artifice, and give it a ton of benefit of the doubt.

I can't say it is in any way more realistic, but it feels more IMMERSIVE.

Whereas with the higher resolution one, it's an uncanny valley. Everything is too smooth and Barbara Walters-y.

Again, this is my memory of how I perceived it at the time, this isn't modern rose coloured glasses because obviously technology has improved dramatically.

Same. I have fond memories of first playing Doom on a 386 with the resolution set to extra low (approximately halving 320x200). The space between the pixels gives your imagination something to do. Sort of like how you can make a room look better by turning off the ceiling lights and just having a small lamp on your desk. I kind of think even if we get 120fps perfectly raytraced VR, it'll never be able to quite achieve the big pixel immersion experience.

I felt similar things with the original Oculus Rift DK1 prototype. There was something magical when the pixel resolution was lower, your mind had to do more work and it somehow felt more immersive due to this..

At least in my eyes, might probably be also because it was the first VR headset I tried though. But the later DK2 and newer models did not capture that same feeling I had with the original DK..

People were already having this debate back in the 90's with Playstation vs. Nintendo 64. PSX was too pixelated while the N64 was too blurry.

Probably because the textures were just too low resolution. You add bilinear filtering to low-res textures, you get something that looks blurry.

Yeah, the texture memory was anemic. 4KB total. If you had mipmapping on, that ate half leaving you with 2KB which is only enough to fit a single 32x32 pixel texture at 16-bit color.

OMG I thought I was the only one. I was on team Playstation and my friends at the time were all raving about N64 and i was like "Am I the only one that genuinely thinks this looks WORSE?"

Both teams were delusional, it all looked bad on consoles :) one had uncorrected perspective, fixed point math resulting in gaps in geometry and no filtering, the other super low res textures resulting in blurry mess.

This is one of the reasons Quakespasm is my favourite Quake source port.

I can run on a modern system at modern resolutions but it still looks like it did back in the day.

Sometimes adding effects and filtering gives a strange broken feeling where the art on the screen no longer matches what is in my head or something.

I can’t handle upscaling old console games either. Something is always weird.

On 'modern' games, Max Payne 1/2 and Alan Wake didn't look "smooth and clean" like Unreal Engine based games, but crisp and "real world" like.

I was quite into QWTF (the original Team Fortress) and being able to use OpenGL allowed you to have gorgeous see-through water. This was a massive advantage because players tried to avoid snipers by going through the water. Also super useful on well6 in the flag room. Ah, the nostalgia.

The original pay to win. Another classic one was being able to afford (or live at university dorm) a good internet connection.

Yes, day and night. I specifically bought my 3dfx accelerator card to boost Psygnosis Formula 1. Adding the card was like switching from C64 to an future PC monster.

I never again experienced such a phenomenal gap in visible performance. Happy times.

I remember playing Quake 2 and colored lighting followed your bullets! I was floored.

Have you played Quake 2 RTX (ray tracing version)? 25 years later it's yet again a quantum leap in the same game!

I loved being able to play Diablo 2 with my Voodoo 5. There could be 100 mobs, plus shitloads of fog effects and fire on screen, and I'd still get like 60 fps.

Diablo 2 was actually programmed to run at 25 fps.

Diablo 2: Resurrected allows you to switch between the new 4k60fps graphics and the original - it's fascinating to see the difference.

Oh you can go way above 60fps! I'm clocking a stable 144hz on ultra!

I really liked that the Pure3D card [1] had a composite video output which allowed me to play Quake2 on my Apple //c monitor. Very bizarre retro future feel.

1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-accelerator-card-rev...

I remember seeing this in a store back in 97 and being blown away by the idea of Windows Games running on a TV. I cannot remember the game they were demoing but I remember it wasn't the most amazing demonstration. I think it was just the difference between the bright colours of Mario 64 compared with some very muddy looking racer.

Yes, I had to play Quake 2 on 320x240 due to low performance of my S3 Virge, but still got floored by the lighting.

I was trying to remember the first hardware acceleration I saw - it was the S3 Virge.

Die it do anything? I remember S3 cards saying you would get HW acceleration, but it was impossible to tell a difference to software rendering.

It worked at very low frames-per-second. Edges and textures were more well-defined. I was very disappointed. I picked up a Voodoo card soon after. S3 made a major mistake releasing unusable 3d acceleration.

Virge provided hardware path at the approximate speed of Pentium 100 rendering 320x200 in software. If your CPU was faster switching to Virge was a speed downgrade.

It had better lighting at least.

personally I like the SVGA screenshots much better

Probably because it looks way different than what we play today while the open gl is more similar to modern fps, just not as polished. But back in the days open gl Q2 was an out of this world experience.

Like the sibling comment said it looked way more impressive back in the day. Plus it looks better when in motion precisely because of the dynamic lightning.

I thought the same (and I was around at the time & in the 90s thought the 3dfx version was amazing)! Today the SVGA version looks like a cool retro style where as the blurry/smooth 3dfx version just looks cheap rather than a stylistic choice (in reality neither were stylistic choices at the time & both determined by the hardware available).

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