Try This Authentic PSX-Style Rendering Add-On For Godot

The wave of indie games going for the PlayStation 1 aesthetic is nothing new, but lately it feels like there are more and more of them popping up. Some people might see it as a lazy way to make a game look interesting, while others see it as a nice break from the constant push for realistic graphics, something we've seen yet again with NVIDIA's controversial DLSS 5.

But getting those PS1 visuals right isn't as easy as it might seem, you need some good understanding of what made the original games look the way they did. Solo Game Developer Calin P recently published a nice write-up explaining how the PS1 achieved its distinctive graphics and how to recreate them in Godot, drawing from his work on his own PS1 emulator, P-chan. Read the breakdown here.

"The PlayStation GPU works via something that's known as a fixed-function pipeline. This means it always draws polygons (not just triangles, that's not a mistake) the exact same way outside some parameters you can set in the draw call. Modern GPUs are programmable, meaning the graphics programmer can write whatever abomination to instruct the gpu into rendering a scene (modern GPUs can do a lot more than rendering however). But what this means for us when trying to emulate the PS1 look, is that we can use the same material for every object in our game, and use instanced rendering to draw literally all 3D geometry in our game in a single draw call*.

*Godot supports instanced rendering (or batching) only in its Forward+ renderer, and using different textures breaks batching."

The final shader is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub, with features that include accurate vertex snapping, a custom lighting system, a flat-triangle depth buffer, affine texture mapping, accurate and granular per-model dithering, color modulation, fog, and even Silent Hill-style fog.

Calin P also recommends this video by Elias Daler, which goes into more detail about fog: