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posted by martyb on Saturday October 12 2019, @01:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the for-some-values-of-phenomenal dept.

We Played Modern Games on a CRT Monitor - and the Results are Phenomenal :

It's true. Running modern games on a vintage CRT monitor produces absolutely outstanding results - subjectively superior to anything from the LCD era, up to and including the latest OLED displays. Best suited for PC players, getting an optimal CRT set-up isn't easy, and prices vary dramatically, but the results can be simply phenomenal.

The advantages of CRT technology over modern flat panels are well-documented. CRTs do not operate from a fixed pixel grid in the way an LCD does - instead three 'guns' beam light directly onto the tube. So there's no upscaling blur and no need to run at any specific native resolution as such. On lower resolutions, you may notice 'scan lines' more readily, but the fact is that even lower resolution game outputs like 1024x768 or 1280x960 can look wonderful. Of course, higher-end CRTs can input and process higher resolutions, but the main takeaway here is that liberation from a set native resolution is a gamechanger - why spend so many GPU resources on the amount of pixels drawn when you can concentrate on quality instead without having to worry about upscale blurring?

Are there any Soylentils here who still use a CRT for gaming? If I could just find a CRT with a 65-inch diagonal, and a table that could support the weight...


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @03:24AM (#906205)

    The FW900 was a phenomenal piece of equipment (and very expensive, when it was new and even now, relatively speaking). But 165Hz at full resolution wasn't possible.

    People who don't understand how CRTs work sometimes look at the maximum resolution and the maximum refresh rate and assume you can use both at once, but you can't. You are limited by the analog bandwidth of the monitor and the horizontal frequency of the electron beam. Analog bandwidth isn't a hard limit, but it does represent the maximum performance before image quality will degrade. You can turn a crisp image at 60Hz into a blurry one at 100Hz, even if the resolution is the same. Horizontal frequency (the maximum rate of scanlines the beam can generate), on the other hand, is usually a hard limit, the monitor won't sync more than a percent or two above that.

    The FW900 manual doesn't sspecify a bandwidth, but it lists a mode with 380MHz, let's round up to 400. That's very good. At 1920x1200 resolution that's about 120Hz. However, it would be limited by its H-frequency to about 100Hz. It does imply that you could squeeze a little more resolution out of it without losing much image quality. The monitor lists a mode of 2304x1440@80Hz (it's 16x10 aspect ratio rather than today's typical 16x9) using the maximum 120kHz H-frequency, which is probably the best tradeoff of resolution, refresh rate and quality.

    Today's LCDs can easily do 1080p at 120Hz, and 4K@120Hz or 1080p@240Hz are available.

    Of course this is a monitor from 2003. If CRTs were still being made for PC monitors, they'd probably have adopted today's high speed data link connections, eliminating analog bandwidth, but the horizontal frequency would still be a problem - this is still analog circuitry at that point.

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