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by NathanielK 1938 days ago
CRTs have some really nice characteristics with moving content. If you're using an LCD or OLED display now, if you quick scroll or drag a window around you'll see you can't read the text while it's moving. CRTs are different though, they strobe in a way that means motion is always clear.

While film lets you hide these artifacts with clever tracking and angles, it's very obvious with interactive video games. There are tricks to fix this, but consumer display tech is quite inconsistent.

2 comments

Very true. A project I'm working on involves some scrolling and animation on older hardware at 60Hz. Looks absolutely smooth on the CRT, but when emulated on a modern display there's always some kind of trailing/blurring.
Some older Zowie gaming monitors let you strobe the backlight at 60Hz to work with older software, as well as some modern TVs. It's quite fiddly to setup, but it can be worth it if you enjoy your old 60Hz locked games looking smooth.
You should be able to read it on OLED, which has instant response time, especially if it's a fancier one with 120fps or black frame insertion. The issues are more likely to be with your eyes than the screen. LED has more motion blur and occasionally flickery blacklights to deal with.
A perfect 120Hz OLED is still over 8ms of blur (MPRT), a crt is closer to 1.5ms MPRT.

There also are almost no OLEDs the right size for PC gaming.

Hopefully as VR tech becomes mainstream, display tech can improve up to the 1.5ms mark.

The issue with modern displays (OLED and LCD) is that they are sample-and-hold, which means that a frame will remain lit for its whole duration, leading to motion blur. Even a perfectly instantenous pixel response won't fix that.
At lower pixel or subpixel brightness OLED is still terribly affected by PWM strobing. Turn/move your head and you can see the on-off-on-off steps required for dimmer scenes or dark portions of a scene.