MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 12:04:

CRT users could benefit from much higher fps, because higher FPS created exploits by breaking game physics and that shows the games were not designed to be casually run at those speeds.

Not always. That mostly started happening during the WinXP era, when multi platform games became the norm, and consoles couldn't exceed 60 FPS due to the TVs of the time topping out there.

Under Win9x, you could run games like Forsaken at nearly 120 FPS without any issues. Any half decent CRT monitor of that era could achieve that refresh rate at lower resolutions like 640x480. Similarly, GLQuake and Quake 2 could achieve 60+ FPS without too much fuss. You did need a powerful graphics card and CPU to get that high, but it was possible in early 1998 with a Voodoo 2 SLI and a Pentium 2 300. Here's a period correct benchmark from Tom's Hardware, though I think they were just using a single Voodoo 2 for their tests. With SLI, the results would have been even better.

All I can say is, I've never seen a photo of a game studio in the 90s that was using laptops with LCDs for development or testing

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-01-20, 12:27:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 12:04:

CRT users could benefit from much higher fps, because higher FPS created exploits by breaking game physics and that shows the games were not designed to be casually run at those speeds.

Not always. That mostly started happening during the WinXP era, when multi platform games became the norm, and consoles couldn't exceed 60 FPS due to the TVs of the time topping out there.

Under Win9x, you could run games like Forsaken at nearly 120 FPS without any issues. Any half decent CRT monitor of that era could achieve that refresh rate at lower resolutions like 640x480. Similarly, GLQuake and Quake 2 could achieve 60+ FPS without too much fuss. You did need a powerful graphics card and CPU to get that high, but it was possible in early 1998 with a Voodoo 2 SLI and a Pentium 2 300. Here's a period correct benchmark from Tom's Hardware, though I think they were just using a single Voodoo 2 for their tests. With SLI, the results would have been even better.

For me it was there from day one, on Win95.

If you play Motorhead at >100 FPS you actually move faster than if you play Motorhead at <50fps. The hardware to push FPS existed at product launch. That was the first game I played online. The first game where team-mates compelled me to upgrade hardware (3Dfx cards, CPU, etc) and overclock and disable lighting effects. And, that is why SONY PlayStation users didn't stay long - they couldn't mod their way into the leagues.

It didn't feel like cheating - it felt like being part of the PC modding community that played such games. We used to ask "FPS?" far more often than we asked "ICQ?" or "ASL?" 😀

Quake had already matured in the same way.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 13:23:

If you play Motorhead at >100 FPS you actually move faster than if you play Motorhead at <50fps.

Of course, there were some instances of this even during the late '90s. But from my experience, the issue became a lot more prevalent during the early-mid 2000s due to the aforementioned reasons.

Even today, I always look up games from that time period on the PC Gaming Wiki to see if they break when using higher frame rates. And sadly, many of them do.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-01-20, 13:35:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 13:23:

If you play Motorhead at >100 FPS you actually move faster than if you play Motorhead at <50fps.

Of course, there were some instances of this even during the late '90s. But from my experience, the issue became a lot more prevalent during the early-mid 2000s due to the aforementioned reasons.

Even today, I always look up games from that time period on the PC Gaming Wiki to see if they break when using higher frame rates. And sadly, many of them do.

Most will break. You say "sadly" but competitive play required playing them "broken" so that is how we played: Competitive play was with the latest graphics cards, overclocking, heat, and CRTs (that can sustain a theoretical ~1000fps). Nobody used a laptop or LCD for competitive play.

But most casual play was not competitive play. Most people didn't stick with a game long enough to become competitive - they circulated video games like movies through exchange stores. So, laptops were legit. PC-replacement laptops were popular in the mid-1990s. That means LCDs were popular too, just not among hardcore gamers.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 13:38:

Most will break. You say "sadly" but competitive play required playing them "broken" so that is how we played.

I say sadly, because I encountered plenty of that breakage in single player games, and it sometimes made it impossible to progress further.

My go to example is Knights of the Old Republic, where your character gets stuck in place after combat with FPS > 60, unable to do anything. I experienced that first hand when I replayed the game several years ago, and it's also mentioned on its PCGW page. Similarly, with Thief: Deadly Shadows, lockpicking stops working at higher framerates, and ladders become impossible to climb. Both are purely single player games.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-01-20, 13:21:

All I can say is, I've never seen a photo of a game studio in the 90s that was using laptops with LCDs for development or testing

That’s largely true but also beside the point.

Developers generally avoided LCDs because, or mostly because, LCDs couldn’t match CRTs for black levels or contrast. Cheap CRTs do an extremely good black.

Laptops were not the primary target platform, but that doesn’t mean laptop users were ignored or excluded. Studios still accommodated them.

And it’s not correct to say studios had no LCDs at all. Very expensive high-end LCDs from vendors like EIZO or IBM were used in very specific workflows such as CAD asset creation or previewing printed marketing materials where a screen's ability to mimic dried ink on a sheet of paper was more important than black levels or motion.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-01-20, 13:44:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 13:38:

Most will break. You say "sadly" but competitive play required playing them "broken" so that is how we played.

I say sadly, because I encountered plenty of that breakage in single player games, and it sometimes made it impossible to progress further.

My go to example is Knights of the Old Republic, where your character gets stuck in place after combat with FPS > 60, unable to do anything. I experienced that first hand when I replayed the game several years ago, and it's also mentioned on its PCGW page. Similarly, with Thief: Deadly Shadows, lockpicking stops working at higher framerates, and ladders become impossible to climb. Both are purely single player games.

That's important too.

The same could be said of Motorhead: Single-player Motorhead at >100FPS is a demo, not a game, because the AI is tuned for players moving at ~30fps. But at the time, joining live servers and playing in teams against living people, ~100FPS was the social expectation (I recall many of us hovering >90 FPS until the next VPU generation obliterated that level). There was no AI, and no lush graphics. It was a different game entirely.

I think this is the category distinction I’ve been circling around:

• Casual single-player play was LCD-friendly: lower framerates, stable timing, and mechanics often tied implicitly to ~30–60 FPS.
• Competitive multiplayer play was 3Dfx-friendly: higher framerates, low latency, CRTs, and gameplay that assumes/rewards extremely minimal graphics.

All mode 13h games on DOS were built around CRTs, if not the small 14" low-res monitors in particulary.
That's why I took screenshots of such games using an portable SCARTV TV with a blurry image (dot pitch of 0.40 mm or worse).

The only mentioning of LCD monitors that come to mind are those of the game "Albion" ('95).
It warns the users that tbe game is "not compatible with LCD-Displays".
https://www.mobygames.com/game/464/albion/cov … 7/cover-857936/

The English warning goes a bit further and says "NOT COMPATIBLE WITH BUILT IN LAPTOP DISPLAYS".
https://www.mobygames.com/game/464/albion/cov … 3/cover-658370/

That being said, I think that games using 640x480 are fine on an 4:3 LCD/TFT.
The resolution is high enough to carry enough information to produce a clean image.
Same goes for 640x400 games in a 640x480 frame, I think.
Japanese games ported from PC-98 platform often used that resolution.

Then there are SVGA games using 800x600 or 1024x768 pixel resolution, evens, which are LCD friendly, too.

What I wouldn't recomend is using 5:4 or 16:9 flatscreens.
Especially 17" LCD/TFT monitors did tend to use 5:4 and 1280x1024 pixel resolution, which stretches even Standard VGA of 640x480.

PS: I was playing games on an LCD display in the 90s, it was on a 486 notebook with monochrome screen.
I fondly remember playing GnuChess on Windows 3.1, for example.

Edited.

PS/2: I had a Casio or Roadstar Pocket TV in mid-90s.
At the time, I remember how it was very futuristic and felt totally unreal.
The screen was a backlit 3" model or something and in colour (!).

By contrast, 486 notebook screen was monochrome and had a ghosting effect.
Which made it quiete hard to use for moving graphics, comparable to an IBM 5151 green monitor.
Anyway, it looked very graceful that way, too. Very professional.

A lot of 'designed for CRTs' on the internet tend to fixate on the diffusion of an analog signal to sell themselves as The Right Way (and cite genesis jailbar effects like sonic water which are not CRT dependent). On VGA, there really isn't much of it - if something was dithered, you'd still know it was dithered.

Decent 3d acceleration on a laptop that could run games with blending and stuff wasn't until late 1999 - s3, ati, trident.

Some 'not designed for laptops' games were more for the lack of a dedicated numpad than video capabilities. It's the passive matrix displays you should be worried about.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 12:04:

CRT users could benefit from much higher fps, because higher FPS created exploits by breaking game physics and that shows the games were not designed to be casually run at those speeds.

If Q3's what you're thinking of, that wasn't until the P4's in 2002 when extreme framerates to break physics were discovered among those 'pros'! Also vsync is optional so you'd still get those framerate exploits on a slow LCD if you're stuck on one, so again, not a CRT-dependent thing. Also 3dfx cards can't ever go as that fast, their memory bandwidth sucks too much.

Jo22 wrote on 2026-01-20, 14:39:

All mode 13h games on DOS were built around CRTs, if not the small 14" low-res monitors in particulary. That's why I took screen […]
Show full quote

All mode 13h games on DOS were built around CRTs, if not the small 14" low-res monitors in particulary.
That's why I took screenshots of such games using an portable SCARTV TV with a blurry image (dot pitch of 0.40 mm or worse).

The only mentioning of LCD monitors that come to mind are those of the game "Albion" ('95).
It warns the users that tbe game is "not compatible with LCD-Displays".
https://www.mobygames.com/game/464/albion/cov … 7/cover-857936/

The English warning goes a bit further and says "NOT COMPATIBLE WITH BUILT IN LAPTOP DISPLAYS".
https://www.mobygames.com/game/464/albion/cov … 3/cover-658370/

That being said, I think that games using 640x480 are fine on an 4:3 LCD/TFT.
The resolution is high enough to carry enough information to produce a clean image.
Same goes for 640x400 games in a 640x480 frame, I think.
Japanese games ported from PC-98 platform often used that resolution.

Then there are SVGA games using 800x600 or 1024x768 pixel resolution, evens, which are LCD friendly, too.

What I wouldn't recomend is using 5:4 or 16:9 flatscreens.
Especially 17" LCD/TFT monitors did tend to use 5:4 and 1280x1024 pixel resolution, which stretches even Standard VGA of 640x480.

PS: I was playing games on an LCD display in the 90s, it was on a 486 notebook with monochrome screen.
I fondly remember playing GnuChess on Windows 3.1, for example.

Edited.

Love it. 13h is like 3Dfx - different eras, but both tightly coupled to the mechanical phosphor behaviours of CRTs.

There’s another wrinkle: Most multiplayer games of the earlier era weren’t online at all. They were played on a single machine, with one display, using split-screen.

Typically those players shared a room, not a lap. I now have some more puzzling to dwell on. Thank you!

leileilol wrote on 2026-01-20, 14:54:

If Q3's what you're thinking of, that wasn't until the P4's in 2002 when extreme framerates to break phyiscs were discovered among those 'pros'! Also vsync is optional so you'd still get those framerate exploits on a slow LCD if you're stuck on one.

Nah. I was casually playing Quake III on the same 3Dfx Banshee that, a couple of years earlier, had been used to break Motorhead’s physics.

Tying game logic or physics to framerate was something each generation re-discovered. What changed wasn’t awareness, but how absurd it became.

My Banshee couldn't break Quake III, but GLQuake was broken before Quake III even existed.

So I tried GLQuake online around 1999 and it was basically an unhinged game of dodgems, where the main objective was surviving long enough to fully spawn.

By the time Pentium 4 arrived, breaking in-game physics was old news and I had already quit.

P.S. I did replace that Banshee. In time I also replaced the CPU, the motherboard, the RAM, the case, the monitor, the mouse... 😉

I didn't really think about frame rates at all until 3D cards. 30 fps was luxurious. LCDs were really uncommon. Laptops were usually passive matrix / DSTN until the end of the '90s and that has ghosting like crazy.

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 15:12:

So what are you really looking for here? Did you play early '90s games? What kind of hardware did you have? Are you mostly a first person shooter guy?

I’m looking for a deeper understanding of people and what they see in machines.

I’m interested in those event horizons where machines shift from contemporary to retro, from retro to museum, and from museum to history. I think about how machines are remembered as each era passes - like the Turin Machine, now an abstract symbol, once a working artefact.

As for me personally: I was familiar with games like Carmageddon and others, but my first own IBM-compatible PC was a Pentium 200 MMX. The first game I installed on my own system was Tomb Raider, along with a strange DirectX 4 Star Wars demo. You read that right. DX4! I clearly remember how that demo crashed constantly and how installing DX4 actually broke DX3. It was a mess.

So no, I’m not coming at this as “mostly an FPS guy,” or trying to defend a particular genre or setup. I’m trying to understand how different people experienced the same eras differently, depending on hardware, timing, and expectations.

Why do you ask?

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 15:12:

I didn't really think about frame rates at all until 3D cards. 30 fps was luxurious. LCDs were really uncommon. Laptops were usually passive matrix / DSTN until the end of the '90s and that has ghosting like crazy.

Umm… that was a big edit 😉

Laptops started uncommon, then became increasingly common until they completely dominated.

And the ghosting is exactly what made me start asking the question: what frame rate is actually “optimal” for those screens? The answer changes with each LCD generation.

For LCD gaming, the general observation is that the framerate ceiling isn’t defined solely by the graphics pipeline - it's defined by the panel itself.

As you rightly remember, early LCD ghosting made that limitation impossible to ignore. If a graphics pipeline could deliver extra frames, the display could only become extra messy.

That mismatch highlights why LCDs could never be loved by competitive gamers who needed extra frames to break the in-game physics. But the laptops were really there, and non-competitive gamers really played games on them.

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 15:12:

I didn't really think about frame rates at all until 3D cards. 30 fps was luxurious. LCDs were really uncommon. Laptops were usually passive matrix / DSTN until the end of the '90s and that has ghosting like crazy.

Hi, weren't 7 to 12 FPS considered "fluent" in 486 days?
I vaguely remember this from playing Descent or reading/watching news about virtual reality of the time.
Not that 7 to 12 FPS were considered smooth at any time,
but rather being considered sort of a minimum, from which onwards it nolonger seemed like stuttering.

LCDs used to have really slow response time. Anything that moved was blurred to heck. In 1994 with some DSTN screen it was all you could do to keep track of where the mouse pointer went. Even in the '00s they still had some blur compared to a CRT.

Framerates were bad on 3D, or really anything that used double framebuffer rendering, because the hardware wasn't fast enough. It wasn't much related to the response time or refresh rate of the monitor. Though maybe I would make an exception for some 50Hz PAL games (eg. on Amiga) which could run smoothly at 50Hz but not 60Hz NTSC.

Throughout the '80s there were people in love with the idea of double framebuffer rendering. They kept designing hardware accelerators, blitters, and graphics processors, but the fillrates were never good enough to run 60Hz full screen until at least the mid '90s. And by then you had the expectation of texture mapping, higher resolutions, and more color depth.

If you're running old games on PC at ridiculous framerates to alter the gameplay, you just turn v-sync off and you don't need to care about monitor refresh rate then either.

BTW, back in the day there was an urban legend going around that "the eye can't perceive more than 12 frames per second". It's great that people have stopped saying this. Unfortunately 24fps video still exists...

Jo22 wrote on 2026-01-20, 17:30:

Hi, weren't 7 to 12 FPS considered "fluent" in 486 days? I vaguely remember this from playing Descent or reading/watching news a […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 15:12:

I didn't really think about frame rates at all until 3D cards. 30 fps was luxurious. LCDs were really uncommon. Laptops were usually passive matrix / DSTN until the end of the '90s and that has ghosting like crazy.

Hi, weren't 7 to 12 FPS considered "fluent" in 486 days?
I vaguely remember this from playing Descent or reading/watching news about virtual reality of the time.
Not that 7 to 12 FPS were considered smooth at any time,
but rather being considered sort of a minimum, from which onwards it nolonger seemed like stuttering.

For me, it would be awesome to find evidence of that - such as an old magazine article.

Thought experiment: The slower the LCD, the longer colours linger on the panel surface. Now imagine the 12FPS galloping animation attached, but on a slower LCD with ghosting! I'm actually seeing it on an Apple Retina display - the animation looks jerky, and I know this isn't how it would look on an early 1990s LCD.

^Hi, yes, I feel the same. I wished my memories weren't that vague. 😅

Edit: I think some Youtube videos about VR mention frame rates..

@bakemono Users who were serious about the Amiga might have had a flicker-fixer/scan-doubler, though.
And used a VGA monitor, which sort of was standard by 1990 in whole computing.
I'm thinking about the A2000 here, which was a real desktop PCs with various slots.
Professionals had used multi sync monitors instead, maybe.
These CRTs existed by mid-80s, even before VGA was a thing.
They had BNC connectors and RGBI and RGB HV inputs, could handle digital and analogue inputs.