Game:

Rayman Rush (2002)

Duration: 7:02

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23

I discovered something kind of surprising about early PlayStation consoles and how much variance there can be in how they render 3D.

It seems that Sony was definitely aware of the issue because it didn't take until just about late 1995 for them to start shipping a hardware revision that changed the "GPU" and RAM. Unfortunately that was still long enough of a production that every major region got hit with at least some of these stinkers. It also seems even after the hardware revision, Sony still dwindled inventory of the old stock as there's no hard cutoff for when an SCPH-100x console is using an updated design. If the console says 1996 or 7 at the bottom, you should be good though.

I included a lot of composite footage just to make it very clear that this definitely would have been visible even on tube TVs back in the day (unless it was REALLY small and shitty).

Oddly, some 3D rendered games don't seem to be affected by this much, if at all... maybe some developers made mitigations with this in mind, or perhaps there could be different rendering modes or options they opted for that negate the issue? In a lot of cases choices of color palette can somewhat mask the banding as well (for example Metal Gear Solid makes off a little bit better overall).

As far as I can tell 2D sprite and tile games don't have any issues with the old graphics hardware at all, thankfully.

The games I displayed were:
-Syphon Filter 3 (the first two also get hit with the banding issues severely)
-Metal Gear Solid
-Rayman Rush
-Tenchu: Stealth Assassins

I've read that Tomb Raider games have terrible banding as well, but don't own them and didn't think it was worth a burn lel

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