It's not tearing, it's called affine swim, and on PC is a tell tale sign of a software renderer. Overall the N64 was ok (I had one). The PS2 was so much better though, there was just a way better variety of good games. N64 kind of sucked if you didn't want to play Goldeneye, Zelda or Super Mario 64 clones.
Also, Tetrisphere! There is a game I had forgotten about. It was so good!
> It's not tearing, it's called affine swim, and on PC is a tell tale sign of a software renderer.
I've never hear the term "affine swim" before. Is it an artifact in rasterization (leaving gaps between triangles) or texturing (the term "affine" suggests that)?
For the rasterization, I've heard the term "watertight rasterization" (or airtight?) being used for a gapless rasterizer. It's not necessarily a software vs. hardware render issue, you can implement a watertight software rasterizer (of course) but I guess in the 1990s this was a performance vs. fidelity issue. And even with early 3d accelerators, the vertex processing was still done in the CPU.
Also, Tetrisphere! There is a game I had forgotten about. It was so good!