How important is 60fps to you?

[Pemalite]

curl-6 said:

JackHandy said:

The thing I notice right away when playing on a CRT is how there's almost-zero input lag. I was trying to play SMB3 on my 4K TV via the Switch one day and kept dying in ways that I never use to die when I was younger. Curious, I went downstairs, popped the actual cart into my actual NES, turned it on, grabbed my controller and within seconds, I was literally flying through that game on my CRT. It was crazy how much more accurate my button presses and timing was. It was as if I were some sort of cyborg ninja utilizing the full brunt of the force!

After that experience, I completely gave up trying to play anything retro on newer consoles (I own all three). From now on, if it's PS2 or older, it's on a CRT via an actual disc/cart. There's just no other way.

I had a very similar experience with the Donkey Kong Country games. Playing them on a HDTV I died all the time and wondered if I was just a worse gamer than I was when I was younger, but once I played them on a CRT again suddenly it felt instantaneously responsive like how I remembered it.

Looks a hell of a lot better than on a HDTV too.

CRT's aren't "Pixel Perfect". - So any pixelated mess is easy to look good.
In-fact, developers would often leverage the scan-lines and dithering of a CRT and make a checkerboard pattern sprite in order to fake a Transparency effect.
On a modern LCD that is pixel-perfect it's not a transparent asset, but rather a checkerboard sprite... And it looks extremely jarring.
For example LCD vs CRT:


Obviously you can "simulate" these effects on an LCD panel by introducing horizontal blur.

So yes, these older games are designed for older displays and will definitely look and play better on older displays.

SvennoJ said:

In some games it gets too hot (98c) and thermal throttled which causes severe stutters, hence I disable turbo for FH4 and FS2020. Testing ori right now temp stays in the high 70s / low 80s with turbo enabled, so not as taxing. However now I'm paying closer attention to it, it's not smooth while running either, lot of very noticeable judder, even when jumping (flying through the air) so scroll speed should be constant. It's very distracting.

My CPU does go up to 3.8 ghz while Ori runs. I see no other settings, just resolution, set to 1080p, full screen, motion blur off, VSync on. Without Vsync the judders are less, but still no constant scroll speed. More playable anyway, but I need to start over I see. No clue what I'm doing anymore, running back and forth in the same area.

No clue how to change the other settings (hyperthreading, affinity)

You can set the affinity in task manager, you just assign your game to set CPU cores. I.E. CPU Core 0, 2, 4, 6.

You *should* be able to disable Hyper-Threading in the bios, but only if your manufacturer allows it... If you can't, just keep the game off the Hyper-threaded cores in Task Manager so you aren't running the game on only two CPU cores but 4 threads.

Turbo is meant to  get your CPU hot, but after a period of time it should "settle" at a set clockrate for any given task.

JackHandy said:

curl-6 said:

I had a very similar experience with the Donkey Kong Country games. Playing them on a HDTV I died all the time and wondered if I was just a worse gamer than I was when I was younger, but once I played them on a CRT again suddenly it felt instantaneously responsive like how I remembered it.

Looks a hell of a lot better than on a HDTV too.

While I understand the reasoning behind it, it does feel strange when you're playing a game one a modern HDTV and it looks far worse. There's this moment of weird disconnect where you're like, wait... why did we think liquid displays were better again? When a TV that was manufactured in 1999 looks and performs better than a TV made in 2021, something is wrong. Clearly, the people designing these things didn't take any of this into consideration.

CRT's did have a multitude of advantages... Really good contrasts, low input latency, no motion blur... But they were heavy, power hungry, expensive to make large and aren't pixel perfect.
OLED's tend to erode many of the advantages CRT's had, such as motion blur and contrasts.

Either way, low-resolution games like SNES titles will always look better on a CRT, they were simply designed for it.

Last edited by Pemalite - on 27 May 2021