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

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

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday October 12 2019, @02:53PM (1 child)

    by epitaxial (3165) on Saturday October 12 2019, @02:53PM (#906338)

    I still toy with the idea of picking up an IBM T221 LCD. So much vertical real estate.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Saturday October 12 2019, @04:27PM

    by toddestan (4982) on Saturday October 12 2019, @04:27PM (#906369)

    I toyed with the idea for years, but never pulled the trigger. Partly because the refresh rate was low - which is fine for what it was built for, but not good for gaming or video. The other reason is to get the resolution back when it was built, it actually acts as several smaller monitors - to your PC it looks like several separate monitors (with actual separate physical connections) and you span your desktop across them and the screen stitches it all together. The original monitors actually came with their own special graphics card to do all of this, which as you might imagine is AGP. Though since the cables running to the monitor are just a bunch of DVI connections you can make more modern graphics cards work with it. Maybe it's not as big of a problem but I'm guessing many games wouldn't play nice with that.

    I also considered buying an IBM T210, which was a much more conventional screen sporting a 21" 4:3 size, 2048x1536 resolution, and can be driven by most any graphics card with a DVI port. But these screens seem to very rare on the second-hand market (much more rare than the T220/T221), long out of production, and I never found the right one.

    Eventually I bought a 4K monitor instead. Still doesn't have the resolution of the T220/T221 but it's close