I remember 2002 as the inflection point, after that large majority of games had widescreen modes, prior to that very few did... and at the time, only the most expensive high end LCD were fit for gaming, the office class ones had very noticeable motion blur. Took another couple of years for them to get reasonably priced.

For FPS games specifically, I always go LCD widescreen. It's just so much more immersive compared to traditional 4:3 displays.

IMHO, CRT is best with 2D games that have a native resolution based on the artwork.

For 3D games you can usually get away with whatever native resolution an LCD uses because the games typically support multiple resolutions.

Widescreen gaming didn't really take off until 2005/2006 which is when the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were released.

While some older games may allow you to use widescreen resolutions, most of them don't adjust the FOV accordingly, and thus end up looking very claustrophobic.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-07, 05:32:

Widescreen gaming didn't really take off until 2005/2006 which is when the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were released.

And when the affordable (and regularly aggressively discounted) Dell 2405FPW came out.

In the late 2000s, any time you saw one of those "post pictures of your desk" threads somewhere, something like half the posts, if not more, would have Dell 2405FPWs and 2407WFPs.

I suspect many people went straight from CRT to those; some may have made an intermediate stop with a 1280x1024 LCD first.

Back in the day I've been using a CRT up until some time around 2007. It was perfectly fine for all games I played back then, including the Crysis demo. Then I got a 16:10 1680×1050 monitor (I still have today) and realized most games didn't support wide screen, though the majority was patched.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-07, 05:32:

While some older games may allow you to use widescreen resolutions, most of them don't adjust the FOV accordingly, and thus end up looking very claustrophobic.

For games that support widescreen, I found they would also support FOV adjustments.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-09-07, 14:49:

For games that support widescreen, I found they would also support FOV adjustments.

There are indeed a few cases where you can set the FOV in older games via INI tweaks or console commands. But whether that functionality exists or not varies wildly for pre-2005 titles.

After the 7th gen consoles came out, the PC editions of multi-platform games started getting more robust widescreen support. And PC exclusive titles caught up soon after.

There's a few older wide-friendly games out there, like Battlezone II and MDK2. They don't vert-. Don't forget wide plasma displays were also a thing around that time, and some games thought about them.

For that era, CRT all the way, if you want the original experience. Back then I had a Mitsubishi Diamondtron 22" or something like that and played all my PC games on that. I didn't get a wide-screen monitor until a year or so after the Xbox 360 was released, and it was a Gateway FPD2485W, freaking amazing monitor BTW. Wish I still had it.

leileilol wrote on 2024-09-07, 19:50:

There's a few older wide-friendly games out there, like Battlezone II and MDK2. They don't vert-. Don't forget wide plasma displays were also a thing around that time, and some games thought about them.

You could also get a 16:9 CRT that did 720p if you had a 4ft deep desk capable of supporting 300lb.... okay maybe slight exaggeration they were fuggin heavy though... If you wanna find one now though, you gotta find some big house noughties rich guy, who could have dropped a couple of k$ on a 30" for the "den", who is using it as a counterweight for his drawbridge and swap it for a washing machine filled with cement or something.

CRT any day!

Yes, modern gaming LCDs have kinda-sorta-maybe almost caught up to CRTs in terms of motion picture rendering (i.e. mitigating motion blur)... but they're still not quite there (and I doubt they would be, simply because of the physics behind the two technologies.)

Just yesterday I popped onto one of my PCs that's connected to a 17" CRT, for a short Need For Speed Underground 2 session. Prior to that, it had been a while since I did any gaming on a CRT. Spotting the difference was instant! As I drove past road signs in the game, I can actually clearly and easily read them, without them looking blurry (despite NFS UG2 being an old game with rather low-res textures.) Same game looks about as good on a modern gaming LCD... and yet, not quite. Yes, on a modern LCD with fast response, I can also read the road signs (though some slight blurriness close to the edges is visible). But there's just something else about the (motion) picture on an LCD vs. on a CRT that makes it "pop out" a lot more on a CRT and look nicer/smoother. I think part of it is that too many LCDs tend to exaggerate the mid-tone colors too much, making games look... how to describe it here? - Lego-like? And also something about viewing the picture behind a glass CRT - looks as if looking through a real glass window into some other world. With LCD, it just looks flat. Again, not sure how else to explain it. No, it's not nostalgia. I've used my CRTs to play modern titles as late as 2023 (Fortnite being one of them too), thus not having any "nostalgia" memories from these newer games. And while I will admit that modern FPS games do span a better picture (FOV/ratio-wise) on a widescreen LCD, that's really the only thing they got going for them. On a properly-calibrated CRT that's set to not be too bright or too dark with decent gamma correction, they still look better on a CRT, IMO, especially at high framerate + high refresh rate on the CRT. In case of NFS UG2, it looks absolutely butter-smooth on my CRT at 85 Hz. And Half-Life? (The original, pre-Steam release) - nice and silky @ 72 Hz default refresh.

All in all, doing many comparisons between CRTs and LCDs over the years, I think I can say that a good gaming LCD @ 120-140 Hz refresh rate looks about on par with a CRT cranking at 75 to 85 Hz. The "no image blur" physics behind CRT really give them an edge in fast-paced games.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-07, 21:50:

You could also get a 16:9 CRT that did 720p

Namely, one of the late-model Sony XBR's. I think Samsung and Toshiba also had a few sets like that, as did Panasonic.

I picked up a 30" Panasonic Tau some years back for free and still have it. It's not a 720p CRT, though - only 1080i and 540p. Its HDMI is non-HDCP -compliant, so it can't connect to a BD players or gaming consoles. Component via my PS3 is about as good as it will do.... and if I have to be 100% honest, it really is a sight to see. Only complaint I have is that, like most CRT TVs, it over-scans the input picture way too much. Shrinking the picture size doesn't fix it, because the over-scanned image is done prior to hitting the CRT RGB amps.
Still, The Last of Us (PS3 connected via component) looks almost like the remastered version on PS4. And no, it's not me exagerrating. I've played this game with my PS3 on a decent Samsung 1080p LCD, some older 720p LCDs, a modern gaming LCD monitor via HDMI input, and etc. But with LCD, the choppiness of the PS3 with TLOU in certain levels becomes even more exaggerated. The same levels appeared much smoother on CRT.

iam using excellent Nec Multisync 21 inch lcd minitor

About aspect ratios:

As someone using an Ultrawide (21:9)(*) for modern gaming, the problem of games not supporting proper FOV scaling is a very common one to this date.

Most games are designed for 16:9, as that is the standard. They also use the horizontal as the reference (aka Vert-), which is a braindead way of implementing things considering most people who are not using 16:9 are typically using something wider, IMHO. This means that - if the game has a FOV setting to begin with - users need to use some calculators to get the actual desired result, and more often than not run out of adjustment range on the FOV settings. Sometimes this can be worked around by hand-editing config files or modding. Some - sadly a minority - of games use the vertical as the reference, which is much more sensible for the vast majority of users (with this implementation, those with a narrower than 16:9 users need to compensate and adapt).

The purist retro gamer will want to use 4:3 for games which were originally meant to be played on 4:3. But if you want to use 16:9, I'd assume will be similar problems for games made before 16:9 became the standard. So I'd stay away from anything wider than 4:3 for this time period (there are some FPS games which have some form of a cult following and some support or open sourced ports, and more often than not work in 16:9 or even wider, albeit that won't be the original experience).

*) I don't see anything wider than 16:9 replacing 16:9 or 16:10 as the standard aspect ratio for reasons of practicality.

I liked CRT for the novelty but ended up going back to flat panel for the practicality with my limited desk space.
As long as the modern screen can keep the aspect ratio or close enough (i.e 5:4) then I'm ok with flat screens.

My most modern rig (win98) can only play some late 90s early 00s games up to about max payne 1 or quake 3 but I just use my sony Trinitron G500 since its really flexible resolution wise and it saves me having multiple displays plus I can also play older titles from the late 80s to mid 90s thus killing multiple birds with one stone , and anyways the right side of my desk is occupied by my 1986 NEC multisync thats hooked up to my amiga 1200 so I wouldn't have any room for an extra LCD.

Personally I use CRT with my retro systems as I and most still used one back in those days. I ditched my 21” Nokia CRT in 2009 and that is when I started to use LCD screens, so my ”newest” retro build from mid 2003 fits with a CRT perfectly.

And it is not just about feels for me, the flexibility of a CRT is just so great and I have a monitor plugged in through KVM to several computers and consoles. LCDs look like crap if you can’t use native resolution or image doesn’t scale perfectly. And I don’t care one single bit about widescreen modes in vintage games.

Yeah if you'd scored a 20-21" monitor by the early noughts, you already had the desk to fit it, and desks were large CRT aware. Then the LCDs were not attractive until nearly the next decade, because you still had 18-19" letterboxed for the newfangled widescreen stuff. Mid noughts decade the 15-16" LCD got reasonable, but again at the low end, motion blur still an issue, and they weren't giving you more pixels, then towards the end of noughts, 18-19" were just getting there. So unless space was the prime concern due to moving or rearranging your space, then it made total sense to hang onto big CRT some 5 years after LCD were "default" with new systems.

I think it was around then that my wife and I moved over from 17" Trinitrons. Got a boxing day deal on 19" Acer LCDs, enough screen to feel like an upgrade and decent enough response time, forget specifics. Though I had previously picked up cheap a used 4:3 14" or two to use on secondary systems.

Earlier adopters might have been questioning their wisdom, a particular problem was CCFL backlights burning out in 18 months to 2 years, then also the capacitor thing reared it's head in the PSUs. Even past the mid noughts models these continued to be a theme, though longevity eked out to another year or so.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-09, 12:54:

Yeah if you'd scored a 20-21" monitor by the early noughts, you already had the desk to fit it, and desks were large CRT aware. Then the LCDs were not attractive until nearly the next decade, because you still had 18-19" letterboxed for the newfangled widescreen stuff. Mid noughts decade the 15-16" LCD got reasonable, but again at the low end, motion blur still an issue, and they weren't giving you more pixels, then towards the end of noughts, 18-19" were just getting there. So unless space was the prime concern due to moving or rearranging your space, then it made total sense to hang onto big CRT some 5 years after LCD were "default" with new systems.

I think it was around then that my wife and I moved over from 17" Trinitrons. Got a boxing day deal on 19" Acer LCDs, enough screen to feel like an upgrade and decent enough response time, forget specifics. Though I had previously picked up cheap a used 4:3 14" or two to use on secondary systems.

Earlier adopters might have been questioning their wisdom, a particular problem was CCFL backlights burning out in 18 months to 2 years, then also the capacitor thing reared it's head in the PSUs. Even past the mid noughts models these continued to be a theme, though longevity eked out to another year or so.

Agree. It was quite a long time that LCDs were actually competitive with quality CRTs although there were many affordable 15-16” models available in mid 2000s. I remember when one of my friends bought a new computer around 2004-5 and he absolutely wanted that kind of cheap LCDs as they were becoming more and more common and thus a ”thing”. When he got it and I saw it first time, I remember thinking that I sure don’t want this kind of crap with my system and I continued to use that 21” CRT for years after that. IQ simply wasn’t good with those, especially with games. And as they had relatively low resolution panels and poor scalers, anything else than the native resolution looked horrible.

I mostly stick with CRT on all my retro systems. But I only have two that are in peak condition. I have another with some unspecified blooming issue, if that's the correct term, and another that I just plain don't like. It's screen geometry is just wrong somehow. I don't think it's settings are wrong, I think the glass for the screen is just more curved than I can get used to. I had a really nice 21" Dell CRT that weighed a ton, but one of it's buttons randomly decided it was now held down 24/7, so the onscreen UI was just constantly up and scrolling through it's options. My attempt to fix it... did not go well. I'd rather not talk about it.

I no longer see CRTs being given away for free or even sold locally anymore. I think the last one I saw was 2 years ago. I guess whenever these last ones I have die, which may be sooner rather than later, I'll move to an LCD. Although in a perfect world I'd like a 4K 4:3 QD-OLED panel, but I doubt they will ever make one.