20 years ago we were all happily gaming in low resolution TVs were only 480 pixels tall

O

onQ123

Member
We could have counted every pixel in a game if we wanted to but we didn't we just enjoyed the games until the HD Consoles showed up & all hell broke loose lol.
 
I let my GPU get really old due to the scalping during covid. Now it's turned into stubbornness because I hate the new pricing. I'm still playing every new game at launch but I'm a lot less caught up in the perf. So long as I can get 60 I don't really care. I bought every Nvidia xx80 card from the 2 series to the 10 series. I used to get so bent out of shape when shit didn't run right. It's a lot easier to just enjoy the game now instead of pulling my hair out over frame timings on launch day. Now it's: "Hey cool I got 60 without having to turn everything down to low! :)" There's a good middle ground that I'm going to try to stay in. I'm going to upgrade this winter, but most likely something budget-y second hand.
 
We were also playing 240p games, which at the time looked bad (atleast on Saturn and Playstation), and look downright horrible today.
2D graphics def aged better than early 3D graphics.

I remember playing PS2 for the first time and thinking that horrible aliasing looked great because it reminded me og how arcade games looked. Today aliasing looks horrible and part of the reason why i love TAA so much (modern TAA, not the blurry crap when it first came out).

Going from PS2 to orig Xbox also looked like a huge jump because of how clean Xbox games looked compared to PS2, even though they were only 480p.
 
i was never happy with that low resolution.

When I first saw HD game (1024x768) at my friends house on his CRT monitor I was blown away:

blown-away-game-of-games.gif


Had to wait few years for PS3 (I was console only gamer at the time).
 
20 years ago I was playing Unreal Tournament 2004 (and other PC games) at a higher resolution than Steam's currently most popular. I believe my TV was 720p at the time.
 
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dave_d said:
Not those of us on PC's. We gamed at 1280x1024 75hz progressive!
Click to expand...
I remember having to game at a lower resolution than the monitor back in the day but back then most computers wasn't trying to push great graphics & I didn't have a dedicated Graphics Card.
 
Definitely not, even back then people were exploring using composite, S-Video, and later component cables to extract that best possible picture out of their consoles.
 
Not me lol I've always been on the lookout for a better display I can't even count how many tvs I've cycled in and out through the years to support my gaming habit.
 
I will say even back then I had an Xbox branded flat screen RCA CRT. There was some special proprietary cable you could hook it up with, but I just went component. I recently acquired a decent CRT for a retro gaming set up in my home office. It's fucking sweet. Doesn't have any special inputs beyond composite, but it was free. I've been keeping an eye out for a sweet component set. No LCD screen can do justice to the response time of SNES F-Zero. The fucking exact moment in time that my finger touches that bumper, Captain Falcon is tilting on Death Wind.

The one single piece of gaming hardware component that helped my frames the most on PC was a nice 1080p/240hz monitor. Superb coming down from a 4k TV. I'm sitting a lot closer so honestly I don't even notice the res difference. The GTX 1080 can actually cook still at 1080p. Helps that I fed it a 7800x3D. Next move will be ultra wide, but not 4k UW. Just the biggest case of diminishing returns in all my years gaming.
 
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The switch off of tv's using 480 for a million years was a thing, sure. But you have to consider the aging of the demographic. A 13 year old these days gives no more shits than a 13 year old in the 90's did.
 
onQ123 said:
I remember having to game at a lower resolution than the monitor back in the day but back then most computers wasn't trying to push great graphics & I didn't have a dedicated Graphics Card.
Click to expand...
Come to think of it I had an ATI 9800 Pro. That was back in the days when the ATI card could be better than Nvidia.
 
I was always frustrated by CRT TVs not being giant, super clear, and having more bold colors. When I saw a plasma TV for the first time, I was on-board for the TV tech evolution. Even now with a 70" TV in my bedroom, I still want more. I won't be happy until I have a 100" OLED in my living room.
 
I was pc gaming then and pc games slaughtered console games those days lol ut 2004 could been an xbox one launch title...different universe than it is now
 
Friend of mine had a chat with his dad today and the old man mentioned they had an old TV in the attic. Me talking about CRTs half the time made his heart skip a beat, but it turned out to be a first generation LCD telly.
i.e. useless e-waste.
 
I mean we also had a blast playing 4 player Goldeneye at 10fps until someone set off remote mines and then it was 3fps.
 
20 years ago, we were rocking 1280x1024 75hz CRT monitors to play games...oh consoles were super unaffordable in so called "Eastern Europe", so I guess I had better equipment to play games than most people in rich world...
 
20 years ago i went from my 5th dead bulky ass CRT monitor to my first LG 17" 4:3 LCD and i loved that fucking thing till i got my first 16:9 24" 1080p.
 
I make a lot more money now. Thus my standards have risen. If I had money back then like I have now guaranteed I would have had the most expensive GeForce card and the highest resolution monitor I could get my hands on.
 
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M1chl said:
20 years ago, we were rocking 1280x1024 75hz CRT monitors to play games...oh consoles were super unaffordable in so called "Eastern Europe", so I guess I had better equipment to play games than most people in rich world...
Click to expand...

"Easter Europe" was always pc land. Half of my class had gaming pcs, me and my friend) were the only console players. PCMR was very mean to us...

sad-crying-black-guy.gif
 
It's crazy to think that 30+ years ago, we had SVGA 640x480 monitors. This was my first PC in 1992. It had a 20 MHz 386SX CPU, 85MB HDD, and 2MB RAM. It's honestly insane to think of how far computers (PCs, Consoles, Phones, you name it) have come in such a relatively short time.

O4yj0R1.jpeg
 
Stuart360 said:
We were also playing 240p games, which at the time looked bad (atleast on Saturn and Playstation), and look downright horrible today.
2D graphics def aged better than early 3D graphics.

I remember playing PS2 for the first time and thinking that horrible aliasing looked great because it reminded me og how arcade games looked. Today aliasing looks horrible and part of the reason why i love TAA so much (modern TAA, not the blurry crap when it first came out).

Going from PS2 to orig Xbox also looked like a huge jump because of how clean Xbox games looked compared to PS2, even though they were only 480p.
Click to expand...
This is why I adored Dreamcast with its clean VGA output.
 
Turn back the clock even more, and folks didn't even play videogames cos they didn't exist. They just imagined all kinds of crazy stuff, based on books and fairy tales, and played card games with low res illustrations of elves and generic dragons and stuff. Those were probably the good old days I suppose.
 
Of course back then we were also familiar with intel producing shitting processors that were too hot for their level of performance. Yes I had a pentium4.
 
20 years ago ? I was playing wipeout 3 this afternoon! 🤣

1080 would have lasted a long time but we moved to fixed pixel displays which looked like total ass ( and still do in a lot of ways )
 
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