is there anything on the N64 that looks as good as say Final Fantasy 9? imo no.
There where alot of PS1 games that looked much better than anything on the n64.

That said from that time periode, mario64 was still my favorite game.

Sheep dog & wolf (PS1) is amasing btw (graphics, gameplay decent):

Bugs bunny lost in time:

Chrono Cross:

Breath of Fire IV (okay this is 2D sprites, but its awesome looking) :

Final Fantasy IX:

I'm an N64 supporter for life, but I've flipped on this one. The blur filter that Nintendo employed muddied assets that should have been kept crisp. The PS1 has some awful examples of 3D pixels crawling all over the place, but I now prefer the sharper image of Sony's machine through my elobarate chain of line-doblers and uoscalers.

Perfect Dark.
N64 Footage:



FF9 Footage:


Perfect Dark simply has superior texturing, lighting, shadowing and geometric details... Not to mention when Final Fantasy 9 looks it's best is when the pre-rendered backgrounds are on-scene.

....And to think Perfect Dark isn't even the best looking N64 game.

Thats true, the benefit of keeping the perspective locked, allowed them to make use of 2D backgrounds, that 3D models walked around on.
Still the effect works, it looks great, its simply doing alot with little. The character models ect are 3D.

And I agree alot of the best looking games on the PS1 are actually sprite based.
While nintendo really went all in on the 3D aspects.

still theres some PS1 games that really blow nintendo out of the water:

Vagrant story:

Like in terms of textures & detail... some of these PS1 games are impressive considering the hardware they where on.

vs

Super Mario 64:

Like if you compaire the face details... or the character models.

In vagrant story the character models hands, has all 5 fingers.... vs mario that just has a round ball, for a hand, and 2 fingers pop in, when he does a peace sing.

Same if you look at the face, look at the hair/eyes/ears... even has a neck :p

In general I find ps1 holds up best,but really it's game dependant. Super Mario 64 holds up pretty good because it doesn't use overly detailed or noisy textures, ocarina of time looks pretty bad. Tomb Raider looks pretty bad, crash bandicoot looks good. Etc

Its hard to compaire a 3D world, vs a lock perspective + 2D background.
But in terms of character models (which both have) FF9 blows Perfect dark waaay outta the water. Like thats not even close.

So geometric detail, model vs models isnt close.

Shadows are the same, just a blurry blob underneat the character models feet, in both games.
Lighting? maybe it goes to Perfect dark, but again its hard to compaire when the 2D backgrounds kinda get in the way of that sort of compairsion.
Textures are better in FF9 too, theres much higher detail there.

You're comparing games with completely different artstyles that were released 4 years apart. You'd be better off comparing games with a similar style that came out at a similar time. 

Mario 64 vs Vagrant is a terrible comparison. One was a launch title, the other came out years later. One is much larger in scope, the other is small closed off rooms. Don't get me wrong, both are good games, but drastically different.  Mario is processing castles, waterfalls, trees, etc.  There isn't much going on in Vagrant, which is why the character models look good.   

In terms of power, it isn't even close, the N64 buries the ps1. The ps1 was a better console because it had better games, but look at Banjo... the ps1 couldn't even begin to pull that off. There is a reason a lot of AAA ps1 games used CG and pre-rendered backgrounds.

The better comparison is spyro vs banjo.  Or jet moto vs wave race.

If we're just comparing the ability to do 3D engines then I think N64 was much better, despite the blurry graphics. Like many have stated, the N64 was designed to do convincing 3D better. For example, the N64 hardware had a z-buffer which allowed for 3D objects' images to remain stationary like they would in reality. For example, when you approach a statue in Tomb Raider and then proceed to walk around it to view it from various angles, the front of the image follows you as if the statue was rotating as you circle it.

Here's an excerpt from a dev interview than explains some other tech details which are beyond me:

"The N64 hardware has something called a Z-Buffer, and thanks to that, we were able to design the terrain and visuals however we wanted.
This was a huge advantage for them. In contrast, for Crash Bandicoot -- which came out for the PS1 at the same time -- we had to use over an hour of pre-computation distributed across a dozen SGI workstations for each level to get a high poly count on hardware lacking a Z-buffer.
A Z-buffer is critical, because sorting polygons is O(n^2), not O(n lg n). This is because cyclic overlap breaks the transitive property required for an N lg N sorting algorithm.
The PS2 got Sony to parity; at that point both Nintendo and Sony had shipped hardware with Z-buffers."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12558589

It's similar to PS2 vs Cube comparisons. Most N64 games look better, but the best looking game were on the PS platform. So it's a bit of mixed bag.