bakemono wrote on 2026-01-20, 19:28:

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...

You're putting your finger on something tangible: 12FPS on CRT does not look like 12FPS on an LCD, because an LCD adds continuous crossfade.

The amount of continuous crossfade is determined by LCD response time. Depending on LCD generation that response might be 200ms, 100ms, 50ms.. (current LCDs achieve ~12ms).

Given an early 1990s LCD with 200ms response time, 12FPS animated input will leave the panel surface looking more like ~20FPS because previous frames are crossfading into the latest frame.

So maybe animated graphics on 486 laptops did look better at ~12FPS?

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 20:36:

You're putting your finger on something tangible: 12FPS on CRT does not look like 12FPS on an LCD, because an LCD adds continuou […]
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bakemono wrote on 2026-01-20, 19:28:

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...

You're putting your finger on something tangible: 12FPS on CRT does not look like 12FPS on an LCD, because an LCD adds continuous crossfade.

The amount of continuous crossfade is determined by LCD response time. Depending on LCD generation that response might be 200ms, 100ms, 50ms.. (current LCDs achieve ~12ms).

Given an early 1990s LCD with 200ms response time, 12FPS animated input will leave the panel surface looking more like ~20FPS because previous frames are crossfading into the latest frame.

So maybe animated graphics on 486 laptops did look better at ~12FPS?

You still see this phenomenon today when comparing OLED displays with LCDs. 24 fps movie content in particular can look a bit choppier on OLED TVs than it tends to on LCD sets (most of which use slower VA panels simply because of their higher (than IPS) contrast ratios).

And yep, that juddery look at lower frame rates is indeed because of the OLED's practically non-existent pixel transition time!

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 […]
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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.

It varied of course. On a 486-33 or 50 you could get 20 some FPS out of Doom and Descent, but Quake would run at like 7 fps on even a 133 MHz AMD 5x86.

Wing Commander 3 and 4 have a limit of 24 fps. Diablo 1 is a 20 fps game and Diablo 2 is a 25 fps game.

But shooters are just a tiny portion of the library. Adventure games are animated for a certain rate. Do you even think about frame rate here? With other genres like strategy it's more about whether a turn takes a long time to process or is the UI sluggish. RTS games were fairly slow paced too.

Most DOS games don't even have a way to measure frame rate.

The obsession with 30 or 60 fps became a thing around 2000 IMO. Nvidia really went into that when Quake 3 was around and GeForce 2 GTS came in. Otherwise I think arcade games were the 60 fps poster boys.

It looks like nobody has made a crossfade emulator, so I tried to make one. See attached screenshot of a single frame only.

I have not compared the emulated output to a real 1990s LCD output so cannot be sure the emulator is faithfully representing old hardware, but it is my best endeavour.

Bottom image: Verified 12FPS animation as presented by MacOS Finder on Apple Retina with ~15ms LCD response time (no obvious blur).
Upper image: Same 12FPS animation recomposed per-pixel emulating ~150ms LCD response time (very obvious blur).

Original 12FPS animation sourced from Wikimedia and posted on previous page.

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 21:40:

It varied of course. On a 486-33 or 50 you could get 20 some FPS out of Doom and Descent, but Quake would run at like 7 fps on […]
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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

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.

It varied of course. On a 486-33 or 50 you could get 20 some FPS out of Doom and Descent, but Quake would run at like 7 fps on even a 133 MHz AMD 5x86.

Wing Commander 3 and 4 have a limit of 24 fps. Diablo 1 is a 20 fps game and Diablo 2 is a 25 fps game.

But shooters are just a tiny portion of the library. Adventure games are animated for a certain rate. Do you even think about frame rate here? With other genres like strategy it's more about whether a turn takes a long time to process or is the UI sluggish. RTS games were fairly slow paced too.

Most DOS games don't even have a way to measure frame rate.

The obsession with 30 or 60 fps became a thing around 2000 IMO. Nvidia really went into that when Quake 3 was around and GeForce 2 GTS came in. Otherwise I think arcade games were the 60 fps poster boys.

The obsession with 30fps was definitely active in the age of 3Dfx Voodoo, which is 1996. I don't know if 1996 marked a start, or if 3Dfx had anything to do with the obsession - it's just my earliest recollection of magazines discussing it and is pretty much when my interest started. I actually bought a Voodoo2 before buying a Voodoo, and can't remember why, so I gloss over that detail - maybe both V1 and V2 were bottlenecked by my 200MHz CPU so it didn't make a difference.

DSTN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cX0MmBMWTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOPOzetiYqo

monochrome passive matrix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n9FSVRhoD8

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:01:

DSTN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cX0MmBMWTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOPOzetiYqo […]
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DSTN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cX0MmBMWTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOPOzetiYqo

monochrome passive matrix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n9FSVRhoD8

I could show a S3 ViRGE running Quake. Why would I do that? Would demonstrating the slowest 3D accelerator available to Quake tell us anything useful about the era?

Likewise, those Youtube videos openly try to show the slowest LCDs in their era. But note the first video ends with a comparison of passive vs active in the same era - surely an honest appraisal needs to consider the best case scenario too?

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 21:57:

The obsession with 30fps was definitely active in the age of 3Dfx Voodoo, which is 1996. I don't know if 1996 marked a start, or if 3Dfx had anything to do with the obsession - it's just my earliest recollection of magazines discussing it and is pretty much when my interest started. I actually bought a Voodoo2 before buying a Voodoo, and can't remember why.

Sure. A Vooodoo card helped tremendously. With Voodoo, GLQuake would run at 640x480 at the frame rate you were getting with 320x200 in software mode and look incredibly better too. I don't think it could quite manage 60 fps though even at 512x384.

I'm sure Voodoo2 was a lot more popular than Voodoo1. The word was really out at that point, and it is a much more capable.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:12:

I could show a S3 ViRGE running Quake. Why would I do that? Would demonstrating the slowest 3D accelerator available to Quake tell us anything useful about the era?

Likewise, those Youtube videos openly try to show the slowest LCDs in their era. But note the first video ends with a comparison of passive vs active in the same era - surely an honest appraisal needs to consider the best case scenario too?

S3 Virge MX was pretty nice actually in a '90s notebook. It's certainly a lot better than being stuck with say Neomagic Magicgraph or Trident Cyberblade or C&T whatever. Notebooks didn't have fast 3D graphics options until like 1999 and that would be ATI Rage Pro-based. Possibly ATI Rage 128.

Notebooks were often sold with both DSTN and active matrix options right to the end of the '90s.

I dunno. I thought you wanted to see what these screens looked like in action.

Whoa.. this is a revelation to me.

I just tried low res clips from Tron (1982) with added LCD crossfade and it's beautiful. To me, at least. Now I need to source the original video, but I don't think any PC can hold every pixel of a movie in memory so I'll need to rethink my approach.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:12:

Likewise, those Youtube videos openly try to show the slowest LCDs in their era. But note the first video ends with a comparison of passive vs active in the same era - surely an honest appraisal needs to consider the best case scenario too?

Hi, as a positive example I have a Compaq Armada notebook with a Pentium MMX 233.
So it's circa 1997-1999. Its LCD screen is just like a modern flatscreen monitor, there's no screen tearing.

It looks like the notebook on the right, but that one has a different screen than mine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohXccB659ok

My model has an active-matrix display that doesn't tear.

Edit: I've remembered that I've filmed my notebook at least once.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcJtP9droLo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vu6XjGN39I

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:25:

S3 Virge MX was pretty nice actually in a '90s notebook. It's certainly a lot better than being stuck with say Neomagic Magic […]
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MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:12:

I could show a S3 ViRGE running Quake. Why would I do that? Would demonstrating the slowest 3D accelerator available to Quake tell us anything useful about the era?

Likewise, those Youtube videos openly try to show the slowest LCDs in their era. But note the first video ends with a comparison of passive vs active in the same era - surely an honest appraisal needs to consider the best case scenario too?

S3 Virge MX was pretty nice actually in a '90s notebook. It's certainly a lot better than being stuck with say Neomagic Magicgraph or Trident Cyberblade or C&T whatever. Notebooks didn't have fast 3D graphics options until like 1999 and that would be ATI Rage Pro-based. Possibly ATI Rage 128.

Notebooks were often sold with both DSTN and active matrix options right to the end of the '90s.

I dunno. I thought you wanted to see what these screens looked like in action.

Serious game titles (e.g. Unreal) shipped with software rendering as the first class rendering pipeline, not 3D hardware.

My point is casual gamers and competitive gamers are playing two different games. Casual gamers play with modest FPS, full graphic immersion, and original in-game physics. Competitive gamers play with high FPS, reduced detail, and broken-physics. LCD only works for casual play, but it works.

Yes of course?

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

It seems to me that most 1990s PC games may have been designed around the most limiting displays that mattered - and those displays were not CRTs.

Sounds like a load of ahistorical rubbish.

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

Another point is that software rendering was really important to games studios: Major titles like Unreal and Motorhead ran smoothly in software at 30 to 60 fps, with hardware acceleration optional.
Was that because laptops didn't have 3Dfx cards?

Not specifically laptops, no. There were still lots of desktops that hadn't been upgraded with 3D accelerators.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 15:33:

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.

DX4 was never released to the public 😁
Were you working for Microsoft?

feda wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:44:

DX4 was never released to the public 😁
Were you working for Microsoft?

I am Microsoft alumni but that's irrelevant.

Truth be told, I have spent decades trying to prove this and I don't care anymore so here's what I honestly remember..

What I remember.. For a time Lucas Arts needed DX4 to demonstrate an emerging Star Wars game, because DX4 is what Lucas developers were anticipating and building against. So it was actually Lucas that distributed DX4 via a magazine CD (I don't remember the publication name - only that it sold in the UK). If you hunted down that original Lucas demo then you would have to find DX4 binaries because there is a dependency ... but I've tried so many times.

And, I'm now unsure what the demo title was.

As you say, Microsoft didn't ship a public release of DX4 (no dispute) so my recollection demands a pre-release demo from a moment before Microsoft cancelled DX4. ChatGPT suggests it was a DX3 release with 4.x file numbering, but my recollection is DX4 and our memories are our memories - if we can't trust our memories then how do we know we are even who we think we are?

So I'm sticking with that and I can't undo it because it's deeply entrenched in my first memories of PC ownership.

What is publicly known is that DX4 was canned, proving it was an actual disaster. Thankfully there were no publicly known disasters when I worked at Microsoft, and I'm not going to say anything that would harm my chances of one day returning 😉

I do think the best hope of actually recovering the files (whether ChatGPT is right, or whether my memory is right) would a fluke among the boxes of my old attic junk. I probably threw the CD out though, because it was viewed as junk at the time: The DX4 binaries broke every other game, and the only demo that actually launched with DX4 binaries was unplayable (too short or crashed, don't remember).

It's a big memory for me because I really wanted that game, until I tired of its dependencies breaking everything else.

Jo22 wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:40:

Hi, as a positive example I have a Compaq Armada notebook with a Pentium MMX 233. So it's circa 1997-1999. Its LCD screen is jus […]
Show full quote

Hi, as a positive example I have a Compaq Armada notebook with a Pentium MMX 233.
So it's circa 1997-1999. Its LCD screen is just like a modern flatscreen monitor, there's no screen tearing.

It looks like the notebook on the right, but that one has a different screen than mine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohXccB659ok

My model has an active-matrix display that doesn't tear.

Here's an ad from a 1998 issue of PC Magazine (on Google Books). There's an STN screen option.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Law6OJQT1sQ … epage&q&f=false

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:46:

There was a DX4 developer release. For a time Lucas Arts needed DX4 to demonstrate an emerging Star Wars game, because DX4 is what Lucas developers were building against. So it was actually Lucas that distributed DX4 via magazine CDs. If you can hunt down an original Lucas demo then you should find DX4 with it.

However, I'm not sure what the demo/game title was. And it needs to be the early demo, because if there was a retail game then that had to have been built against DX5.

Rebel Assault 2, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, Shadows of the Empire, or Jedi Knight?

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 23:02:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:46:

There was a DX4 developer release. For a time Lucas Arts needed DX4 to demonstrate an emerging Star Wars game, because DX4 is what Lucas developers were building against. So it was actually Lucas that distributed DX4 via magazine CDs. If you can hunt down an original Lucas demo then you should find DX4 with it.

However, I'm not sure what the demo/game title was. And it needs to be the early demo, because if there was a retail game then that had to have been built against DX5.

Rebel Assault 2, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, Shadows of the Empire, or Jedi Knight?

I think he probably meant Shadows of the Empire, but I have the demo here and the readme says 3.0a. Retail required DX5.

feda wrote on 2026-01-20, 23:06:

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 23:02:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:46:

There was a DX4 developer release. For a time Lucas Arts needed DX4 to demonstrate an emerging Star Wars game, because DX4 is what Lucas developers were building against. So it was actually Lucas that distributed DX4 via magazine CDs. If you can hunt down an original Lucas demo then you should find DX4 with it.

However, I'm not sure what the demo/game title was. And it needs to be the early demo, because if there was a retail game then that had to have been built against DX5.

Rebel Assault 2, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, Shadows of the Empire, or Jedi Knight?

I think he probably meant Shadows of the Empire, but I have the demo here and the readme says 3.0a. Retail required DX5.

I revised my post to be as open as I can be. Please don't waste time trying to solve this puzzle because I have searched Archive.org and ChatGPT and Google and got nothing but disappointments and a headache. I try every few years, 🤣.

swaaye wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:25:

S3 Virge MX was pretty nice actually in a '90s notebook. It's certainly a lot better than being stuck with say Neomagic Magic […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-20, 22:12:

I could show a S3 ViRGE running Quake. Why would I do that? Would demonstrating the slowest 3D accelerator available to Quake tell us anything useful about the era?

Likewise, those Youtube videos openly try to show the slowest LCDs in their era. But note the first video ends with a comparison of passive vs active in the same era - surely an honest appraisal needs to consider the best case scenario too?

S3 Virge MX was pretty nice actually in a '90s notebook. It's certainly a lot better than being stuck with say Neomagic Magicgraph or Trident Cyberblade or C&T whatever. Notebooks didn't have fast 3D graphics options until like 1999 and that would be ATI Rage Pro-based. Possibly ATI Rage 128.

Notebooks were often sold with both DSTN and active matrix options right to the end of the '90s.

I dunno. I thought you wanted to see what these screens looked like in action.

Thank you. I did want to see. Sometimes I get the wrong end of the stick.