Yeah, texture filtering can definitely be used to an artistic effect.

In early PC games it was a globally applied video config setting because different graphics cards might have steep performance implications to using different filtering and mip rules.

In later hardware the point-vs-linear performance tradeoffs became minimal (except for anisotropic filtering where sampling points locality can diverge view-dependently in the cache), and so it became one more tool in the artists' toolbox. They could mix uses of different filtering modes per texture and model in a game. This is a cheap way to provide different intended artistic effects, so point sampling vs linear sampling might no longer show up as a global setting, and only aniso might remain. Of course still varies per game.

I don't really care about the tone of that video to be honest. It is a bit silly to listen to someone continue an argument they have had with someone else prior. It feels a bit like "someone told me what to do, and I didn't like it, but I didn't know what to say back at the time, so now I feel like I want to make a video to continue this argument towards other people." The end result is kind of "gatekeeping" comments and perpetuating previous arguments that the viewer wasn't originally even part of. In a few years the chances are that the video author will forget their original emotion and look back at the video and cringe "I've no idea why I felt like I had to make that video in the first place, that is not much content".

For old games that have quality settings, I tend to play out with the different settings, explore how they look like, and settle with a setting that I enjoy. It does not include a dogmatic must-do-this-or-that rule.

Unreal 320x240x32 Software rendering

Takedasun wrote on 2024-03-14, 13:23:

Unreal 320x240x32 Software rendering

You did specify it's software rendering, but at that resolution I honestly couldn't tell if there was any filtering or not 😉

In the context of modern retro-styled games: It's a stylistic choice, I'll take whatever the artists decided upon (or not buy it in the first place). As for actually old titles, imho there's lots of little cogs working together. For example, what kind of filtering are we talking about, anyways? I remember a huge increase in visual quality when going from (iirc) a Voodoo 2 to a Matrox G400 due to the former using a simple "smear" while the latter added some noise giving the textures some, uh, extra "texture". Both filtered but very different. Another would be mip mapping. If done overly aggressive it tends to look shitty (the very noticeable "wake" of major quality dropoffs right in front of you), while if everything's unfiltered/chonky anyways it helps hide that - but if done right it doesn't matter.

revolstar wrote on 2024-03-14, 14:35:

Takedasun wrote on 2024-03-14, 13:23:

Unreal 320x240x32 Software rendering

You did specify it's software rendering, but at that resolution I honestly couldn't tell if there was any filtering or not 😉

Unreal software renderer does some weird filtering of its own. At this ratio of texels to pixels it is bearable, but still keeping some distance from textures helps.

elszgensa wrote on 2024-03-14, 14:42:

In the context of modern retro-styled games: It's a stylistic choice, I'll take whatever the artists decided upon (or not buy it in the first place). As for actually old titles, imho there's lots of little cogs working together. For example, what kind of filtering are we talking about, anyways? I remember a huge increase in visual quality when going from (iirc) a Voodoo 2 to a Matrox G400 due to the former using a simple "smear" while the latter added some noise giving the textures some, uh, extra "texture". Both filtered but very different. Another would be mip mapping. If done overly aggressive it tends to look shitty (the very noticeable "wake" of major quality dropoffs right in front of you), while if everything's unfiltered/chonky anyways it helps hide that - but if done right it doesn't matter.

I agree almost completely. However, the lower detail on Voodoo is not caused by filtering being some "smear", the filter itself is fine.

Bad textures on voodoo were caused by lack of texture ram, 256x256 texture size limit and no FXT1 texture compression support by contemporary software. You went from 2-4MB of texture ram, as its divided between two TMUs on V2, to a 32MB unified ram card.

as for Texture filtering. Boomer shooters are nostalgia vehicles, target audience associates early FPSes with Duke3D and Quake in software rendering mode.

Takedasun wrote on 2024-03-14, 13:23:

Unreal_06.png

as an aside, that last pic is an example of the total wow factor unreal could create when it came out, even on modest systems it could in some moments look like you were in a genuine "world"

Back in the days of antiquity, I ran a Matrox Mystique alongside a Voodoo1. I would sometimes run games (like Jedi Knight) on the Mystique instead of the Voodoo. The lack of bilinear filtering creates a perception of greater detail. It reminds me of how a noisy audio resampler / filter can make music seem to have more detail.

Unreal does have an interesting software renderer. UT2004 also has a software renderer called Pixomatic by the way. It targets Pentium4's capabilities so it is much higher quality than earlier examples.

It depends. If the game was originally pixelated then I want it pixelated, in general I hate the smooth filtering and always have, that’s been a long standing feeling among many retro gamers for many years. But on the other hand, the filtering is a core part of using a voodoo in these early games, and it would ruin the experience if you didn’t have it even though the games were originally pixelated and even though I’d want them pixelated on a modern machine. But I’d want them filtered on a voodoo.

But in general yes I hate filtering and always have and many other people have always felt the same which is why most emulators have an option to disable it, and why that option has been around for many years.

I dislike when people post this stuff like it’s a new hot take when it’s been around since forever, 20+ years in this case.

I'm all for texture filtering. When I got my Rage 128 in Dec 1999, finally able to do 3D Acceleration, you better believe I loved texture filtering. Games stopped looking like 'Duke 3D' or something and we're smooth'. In retrospect those are some very low res textures of that era being filtered. As such I feel that texture filtering of throwback low res texture games is a vibe and I wish it was an option on all of those games.

One of the reasons I put overkill graphic cards in PC's is so I can enable things like anti aliasing and filters to make the game look as good as possible.
but I also keep the game original and don't apply things like High Definition patches or similar.

I find this is the perfect balance between a nice looking game but still keeps original nostalgic feel

On a side note - I'd love to see some texture filtering mod for Minecraft! My son keeps bugging me to play it with him and I find the ginormous bare pixels a pain to look at 😜 It'd prolly end up looking like Mario 64, which isn't that bad IMHO 🤣

midicollector wrote on 2024-03-14, 22:34:

I dislike when people post this stuff like it’s a new hot take when it’s been around since forever, 20+ years in this case.

You're right, this has probably been going on for decades, I found mentions of people preferring to switch off texture filtering in GLQuake on some old Quake fanpage dating back to late 90s. But still, it's news to me, so I was hoping we could have a civil discussion here 😉

Depends on the context

- if it's an emulator, no filtering is forced and no non-filtering is forced. canon filtering only.
- if it's a enhanced port of a game that defaults it on i'll roll with it. older ports usually can't do anything about odd texture sizes so there's texture quality loss to begin with where nearest neighbor forcing won't help you there. Forcing nearest also won't replicate the old software ways of handling mipmaps per polygon chunk
- if there's lightmaps involved, definitely filter on. Turning off filter with a smoothed lightmap isn't precise to the texel. and then there's the uglyness that is unsmoothed lightmaps
- if you market your filtering toggle as '3dfx support' or otherwise as 'software rendering' (as in not actual software rendering) then i hate you

I was also puzzled when I saw the new Tomb Raider 123 remaster where you can switch between the new graphics and the "original" graphics. The original graphics in the remaster have no filtering so it looks worse than the actual original game where you couldn't disable filtering. It also has a very big UI and text like the playstation 1 version (actually like the modern smartphone version) while the pc version had a small UI.

Many people had a Playstation 1 instead of a pc, so when they play old games they want the nostalgia and the lack of filtering is part of it. In the FF7 Steam version you can enable or disable the texture filtering and I noticed some people play without filtering while it wasn't possible back then. You could disable filtering with hidden graphics card settings but I don't think FF7 would work on a graphics card that didn't have texture filtering (except maybe the Matrox G100 but I'm not sure).

I remember the first time I saw the voodoo 1 at a friend's I stood close to a wall in Turkok to see the filtering. The texture had maybe 4 pixels stretched on the whole screen but it looked so nice at the time. A bit later when S3 made their texture compression, I thought texture filtering was only temporary and in the future the texture resolution would be so high you wouldn't need filtering anymore. I still liked filtering though. I don't remember at which resolution I played at the time but I always had it pretty low. I never used antialiasing unless it's forced.

Maybe Unreal engine or other engines started the trend of pixels and dithering too. When objects appear or disappear there's this dithering that the Matrox Mystique did instead of transparency. I don't like it but I understand it's an optimization. Maybe people like it now.

I think in general there's a lot of confusion about how games looked. Some games got an hd remaster while it was already possible to play the game in a high resolution back then on pc. Sometimes people say CRT were blurry but I think they remember the LCD upscaling, because a CRT is sharp. In windows in 1600*1200 on a CRT, pixels aren't as sharp as a modern screen, but when playing video games pixels are sharp. Someone told me that CRT are leaving a trail behind the mouse cursor but it's wrong, it's something that a LCD does. Someone showed a CRT shader with a fake screen around the game with lots of reflections on the plastic, which also don't happen on a CRT. I think many people played on a console and when they say CRT, they actually mean a CRT TV. I also saw a youtube video that showed old Monkey Island clips also posted on youtube, and the youtuber complained that it was in 240p and not in 1080p, but with a nearest neighbor filter and if Youtube's compression was higher, 240p would be enough for a game in 320*240 or 200.

chuky wrote on 2024-03-17, 04:48:

I don't think FF7 would work on a graphics card that didn't have texture filtering (except maybe the Matrox G100 but I'm not sure).

G100A had filtering (matrox's first filtering) but there's no blending functions for FF7 to render effects with.

chuky wrote on 2024-03-17, 04:48:

Maybe Unreal engine or other engines started the trend of pixels and dithering too. When objects appear or disappear there's this dithering that the Matrox Mystique did instead of transparency. I don't like it but I understand it's an optimization. Maybe people like it now.

DirectDraw was very slow with video memory reads (for typical blending lookup tables) so dithering had a bit of revival. LithTech's software renderer is also dither heavy

chuky wrote on 2024-03-17, 04:48:

I was also puzzled when I saw the new Tomb Raider 123 remaster where you can switch between the new graphics and the "original" graphics. The original graphics in the remaster have no filtering so it looks worse than the actual original game where you couldn't disable filtering.

Tomb Raider only had filtering if you had a video card like the voodoo, at the time most people didn’t so either pixelated or filtered would have been period correct. I remember playing it both before and after getting a card that did filtering. But in general they’re probably trying to match the look of the ps1 version. I’m glad they have a no filtering option though because I would want none if I was playing it on a modern computer. On a voodoo of course I would want it but not in a port.

I agree though that people don’t remember how games looked. I think most of that is because the games came out long before they were born so they simply weren’t alive yet at the time. Like it always bothers me that people think all CRTs had huge scan lines. I tend to specifically collect CRTs without scan lines just so I can try in some small way to dispel that. Even the ones with scan lines, the scan lines are often only barely visible and only visible in certain types of media.

midicollector wrote on 2024-03-19, 17:26:

chuky wrote on 2024-03-17, 04:48:

I was also puzzled when I saw the new Tomb Raider 123 remaster where you can switch between the new graphics and the "original" graphics. The original graphics in the remaster have no filtering so it looks worse than the actual original game where you couldn't disable filtering.

Tomb Raider only had filtering if you had a video card like the voodoo, at the time most people didn’t so either pixelated or filtered would have been period correct.

No, you can use the bilinear filter with all the supported chips that have the feature.

I read midicollector's comment as "only [some of the] hardware accelerated versions did filtering", which afaik is true.

The one reason I might prefer a software renderer without hw texture filtering as originally intended, would be how much optimized those games probably were to even run at those slow fps without an hardware acceleration. For that games like Doom or Quake were impressive and so also some evolutions like the 3DNow! Beta version of the second.

Hardware accelerated paths of these games were like different games at first and of course increased a lot the graphic so much anyone could see those effects and resolutions while not always that important it was the next gen gaming for sure. But nowdays .. thinking to do a game that looks like born in the 90 but that would probably weight 100GB anyway and using who knows so many sw layers I can't imagine, it's not a need but just some sort of nostalgic look instead of optimization to the last bit of code.