Were the N64's graphics not that hot or am I upscaling it wrong?

I'm curious to try UltraHDMI with Deblur on in conjunction with the Marseille's mCable.

I never said it didn't look amazing. RGB 4:4:4 is the best.

 

I don't think most people can tell the difference.

Another photo this time on my phone
Looks close to the CRT

 

That looks pretty good man. Surprisingly so actually. The framemeister can output nicely at times. I use my fm for gamecube via component. looks great.

 

Subjectively, I feel like the sweet spot for the Nintendo 64 is a good quality consumer TV or lower line count professional video monitor at a 14 inch screen size. A shame for multiplayer, but in truth its video was a total mess. I was so forgiving as a kid.

 

So I guess the consensus is CRT if you can, upscale with Scanlines?

 

One of the big problems with the N64 graphics is that it's limited to 4k textures (I.E. 64x64 pixel). You can do multiple texture passes, but due to the way the memory system is implemented this is a relatively slow process - the net result of this was that in most cases the developers used as as few textures as they could get away with and made them as small as possible and used the RCPs interpolation features to smooth the result so it didn't look pixellated.

This also gave the developers a very strong incentive to optimize the texture usage - and from this perspective, displaying any more data than would be visible on the sort of displays it could be expected to be used with (I.E. consumer spec TVs) would not be an optimum use of the resources.

 

Sad reality was 64 was designed to take advantage of the low resolution of crts at the time. Consumer crts helped mask a lot of the shortcoming the 64 had graphically. Console 3D graphics at that time were still in their infancy. Plus most people didn’t use high quality video connections for their TVs durring that time. As long as it looked good through composite it was fine.

In fact often they’d check graphics through a regular Tv in composite as they assumed it be the only way the system would be connected to the tv. If you look closely when playing on a crt you can actually see a lot of grain moving in the image. Ulttra Hdmi really is best video option as it can adjust and turn off things the oscc and framiester can’t do since they’re not directly connected to the video chip. Problem is of course it’s a pretty pricey mod.

 

my n64 looks so bad on my flatscreen TV it's basically unplayable.