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Unpopular opinion - CRT>LCD?

soundlogic
13 hours ago, Aereldor said:

After watching these Digital Foundry video-
 


I decided to plug into an old cheap LG CRT display I had knocking around from the 90s, and boy was it good. CRT's don't have a native resolution, so unlike rendering 720p content on a 1080p panel, which causes unbearably ugly pixel stretching, running anything from 800x600 to 1440x1080

The response time is fucked up too, damn near instantaneous, especially when I subbed out my wireless MX Master for a low-latency wired mouse. And motion rendering is incomparably better, I conclude this is because a CRT doesn't just render one frame at a time using LCD's sample-and-hold technology, but renders the screen in a series of lines, often encompassing multiple frames in one pass. It also handles a higher refresh rate no prob, you can set all these manually. It's astonishing.
 

I thought the colour gamut would be lacking, but after some tweaking... It really wasn't. Sure, CRT monitors usually don't even cover the entire sRGB colour space, but I managed to get it adjusted to nice, natural colours. It's actually on par with a few of the worse TN panels I've used so far, although not as good as my BenQ EW2440L VA monitor, and far from the OLED panel on my laptop. But from someone used to an OLED display, calling the CRT colours acceptable after calibration is high praise.

Am I switching to CRT? Hopefully. Currently I don't live in my tiny meme NYC apartment and have the space to keep mine around. Unfortunately I'm giving my desktop to my sister, and my laptop only does HDMI out. Time to buy an HDMI to VGA adapter?

Furthermore, I'm inclined to test Ray Tracing on my 1060 through DXR, now that I can render my games at 800x600 and they still look good, and my GPU isn't even hitting 50% usage at max settings. Thinking of buying Control, Rise of the Tomb Raider, or Battlefield V to test the ray tracing, should be completely duable at a resolution that only has 10% the pixels of 1080p.

What are your thoughts. Anyone doing the Russian Counterstrike Pro setup of a CRT monitor, 80s PS2 keyboard, and a lawn chair?

Not unpopular. they're great if you don't wanna see what you're doing

Dirty Windows Peasants :P ?

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17 hours ago, Aereldor said:


I decided to plug into an old cheap LG CRT display I had knocking around from the 90s, and boy was it good. CRT's don't have a native resolution, so unlike rendering 720p content on a 1080p panel, which causes unbearably ugly pixel stretching, running anything from 800x600 to 1440x1080

See the thing is, the reason a lot of old stuff looks horrible on LCD's is because the default is to stretch the pixels in the monitor rather than integer-scale. You know, the feature nVidia decided to introduce last year. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14765/nvidia-releases-geforce-436-02-driver-integer-scaling-and-more

 

But prior to that you always had the option to let the GPU do the scaling and not the monitor, and force it to do aspect ratio scaling. That gave usually a good, or good-enough aspect ratio scaling for most things, including older games.

 

However that doesn't solve every problem, especially retro-inspired games which look like 256x256 resolution but actually are running at 720p or 1080p and cropped to fit.

 

Like my minor beef with those games is not the gawd-awful obsession with scanlines (which I think are terrible), but rather the lack of adherance to the color-space they are trying to replicate. So you will get games that pretend they are GB/NES/SMS/SNES/MD games, but they are far more colorful than an actual vintage hardware, and I can safely say that they also sound much nicer than the vintage hardware, too nice, sometimes they sound sterile.

 

But those are minor issues that you'd only care about if the developer tried to sell it as a vintage-inspired game but basically only used the pixel-art and flat colors of the vintage game and not the actual hardware palette limitations and didn't limit to the vintage audio/music hardware limitations.

 

The only thing that a CRT does better than an LCD is the latency, and refresh rate. CRT's all have worse color-space, make high pitch noises when they operate that induce headaches, make your eyes strain, emit x-ray radiation, and in general it's a wonder we kept these things around as long as we did. That latency reason is why Vintage CRT's are still used in repairing arcade machines and not LCD panels.

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