Why did the PlayStation 1 have so much Dithering? | MVG

Vaguely related. We recently implemented dithering in to the hardware renderer in PCSX2, and we've had pretty much nothing but complaints from people wondering what all the noisy colours are 🤣

Love these PS1 features. Can we have a video on the Atari Jaguar and why it was so difficult to program for in the future?

When you think about it, this makes our eyes and the parts of our brain that process the input look so amazing. We're seeing and processing several million different colours every second of our waking lives like it's nothing special.

My gosh Spyro on a crt looks so freak'n magical, exactly like how I remembered it way back as a kid :D

"4 shades of gray" ... sounds like a bestseller to me! :D

Dithering is also a technique used in printing through screening. We dont mix cmyk to create new colors on paper, we just place dots of each ink beside each other so they give the illusion of more colors Therefore, you can say screening started before electronic displays, it started when lithographic plate printing started Heck you can even say it started when we started using the dot technique for oil paintinga.

Dithering is something we have started noticing for some years. When we were kids playing PS1 titles, we weren't able to notice, both because of our intrinsic lack of attention to details and CRT monitors. I think dithering is a great engineering trick that, at the time, made possibile the (apparently) impossible.

I love that you can tell N64 from PS1 just from how a game looks. Such unique vibes from those two consoles

Great explanation. On the N64 the console applies a post-process filter to smooth out the dithering, making it less noticable but still can leave some artifacts if you know where to look. The same can actually be said for the original model 3Dfx Voodoo - it too applies a 4x1 anti-dither filter by default, making some textures look smeared horizontally (this can be disabled via an environment variable though, which does clean up the image at the expense of more noticable dithering).

Finally, someone straight up saying they like the flaws of an older 3D system. We hold affection for sprite-based 2D games, why not early 3D's low-poly, low-res, dithered aesthetic? One of the reasons surely that I love the DS so much is that it combines the two—it's like a portable Saturn and PSX in one.

Hey, don't think you were going to sneak Touhou music past me! Touhou 4 LLS's title screen music at the start of the video! Great taste!

I just wanted to say thanks for the work you do. I love these videos. It's incredibly hard to find content of this quality and with this level of depth. Also, as someone who loved my softmodded og xbox, thanks for the work you did in that scene too. :)

Thank you! I really wanted to know why console with advertised 24 bit color had so much dithering. Great video and very thorough explanation.

MVG, I love these video format and breaking down the technical jargon to levels that people like myself can understand. I often watch Digital Foundry and get lost in the jargon that they use. Looking forward to more videos like these!

Always love learning about the tech behind retro stuff like this. Keep up the great work!

The dithering on the PS1, although I never knew what it was called until now, I loved it. It was a unique look for the games and MGS wouldn't be the same without that look. Great video mate. Cheers.

I try to hide it in emulation because back in the day I didn't see it on my CRT. It was all smoothed out. So the dithering itself doesn't have any nostalgic feeling for me.

Dithering is part of the PS1's charm and I wouldn't want it any other way. One thing that I did learn very recently is that early models of the PS1 (specifically the SCPH-100x models from 1995) had garish color banding in addition to the dithering as a result of some limitations in the GPU. A change of RAM type and a redesign of the GPU around 1996 fixed that. As it happens, I own one of those early SCPH-1002's and the banding really stood out for me when I played Soul Reaver through a Framemeister. Before that I had never really noticed it so much. Tomb Raider and Spyro also suffer quite a lot from it, though not as bad as Soul Reaver does. I guess it's just one of those quirks from the early days of 3D graphics.

Your videos are so interesting, I think it's my favourite gaming channel now

The nintendo 64 had a filter to mask out the dithering as well that mostly worked, but made the picture a tad blurrier, specially on games that tried things such as screen tinting and caused a lot of dither (starfox 64/shadow man). The 3Dfx cards also had a pretty good filter for their 15bit color output.