The irrational dream of having CRT monitors in 2020

Backstory – In March 2020, Doom Eternal was released to the public.

So what does that have to do with CRT monitors? Let's find out.

Backstory

Back in 2017, I played Doom 2016 and was hooked. It was a great game and felt almost like some sort of UT2004 single player experience because of the fast action and pacing.

When ID Software announced a followup, I was again hyped and looking forward to the release.

During March, it was more and more apparent that my current setup with a GTX 960 and an i5-2500K would not be able to handle the game. The system in question used to be state of the art in 2012, and I didn’t really need a new PC for a long time. All my previous upgrades were triggered by game releases. In 2004, I upgraded to play Half-Life 2. In 2012, I upgraded again to play Starcraft II. So you can say, those games were system sellers for me.

In April 2020, I upgraded to a Ryzen 7 3700X and an RTX 2070 Super to finally play more recent games. But what else do you need for a good gaming experience? A high-quality gaming monitor, of course! The past seven years, I used a 1200p Dell office monitor for gaming. The picture quality for static images was good, the text readable. But for dynamic images, this monitor had quite an awful amount of motion blur.

I was never really an early adopter, and I only ever upgraded my hardware when necessary. In the meantime, gaming monitors had changed. 60 Hz is no longer state of the art, and the need for a 1200p resolution for more lines of text on the screen was no longer a requirement as 1440p and 4K are now mature technologies and I would just need to buy a larger monitor to get the same results.

I ended up buying the ASUS TUF Gaming VG27AQ on Amazon, as the current COVID-19 epidemic didn’t allow me to buy electronics in local stores. I was especially interested in the ELMB-Sync (Extreme Low Motion Blur) feature, as I had hoped that backlight strobing might finally result in a CRT-like experience on TFT monitors. You know, no motion blur?

ELMB-Sync is a specific feature you find only on ASUS monitors (by the time of writing this). It is a Variable Refresh Rate technology coupled with Backlight Strobing. Compared to G-Sync monitors, which can only do either G-Sync or ULMB (Ultra Low Motion Blur), this was advertised as being a step forward.

But it turned out that this monitor sucked at it. I had issues with strobe cross talk for every refresh rate I could think of. I was quite unhappy with the device, and returned it shortly after only 3 days of testing and usage.

A photo of the strobe cross talk test from www.testufo.com on the VG27AQ

As a “videophile”, it’s pretty difficult to buy display devices. Most technologies have advantages and disadvantages to them, and it seems to be impossible to find something which is the best of all aspects. Even so, making the decision to buy the VG27AQ based on reading various reviews seemed to be inadequate. A friend of mine told me not to rely on rtings.com alone and suggested reading articles on sites like tftcentral.co.uk as well. So, the search was still on.

It was on May 16th 2020 when I decided to buy the “least crappy monitor”, as a “best one” was not available, and ended up with the ASUS ROG Swift PG279QE, which is still my monitor as of writing this article. Compared to the ELMB-Sync of the VG27AQ, the ULMB of this monitor was significantly better. The strobe cross talk was weaker, but was still there. The biggest problem was the restriction of refresh rates, as a lot of fantastic games were still limited to 60 Hz. Some examples are Factorio (released in 2020), Freedom Planet, Carrion (also released in 2020) and most emulators for older systems. ULMB could be hacked to allow 60 Hz backlight strobing, but it ended up hurting my eyes and I did not use it.

But in the end, this monitor wasn’t that bad. This was my first monitor with a variable refresh rate, and G-Sync worked fine with Doom Eternal. I played the game and I was happy.

Food for Thought

But after murdering thousands of demons, I felt something was wrong. Is this really how display technologies are supposed to work? Why can’t I scroll in Age of Empires 2 and read the text at the same time? How does everyone just accept this? Am I having mental issues which cause only me to see this motion blur?!

In 2019 and the beginning of 2020, I was rather busy developing an Amiga game which was to be released in March 2020. Tiny Little Slug was finally up for sale after many grueling debugging sessions to fix all the bugs that remained.

I still operate my Amiga on a Commodore 1084 monitor even after all these years. It’s one of those 14" CRTs you just have to love because of the excellent image quality, bright picture, strong contrast and lack of motion blur. While the development was done using an emulator, the final testing of the game was performed on a real machine. Through that, I was exposed to the smooth picture on the CRT. The Commodore 1084 outperformed all recent gaming monitors in terms of motion clarity. 30 years, and TFTs are still playing catch-up.

I tried to remember when and why we all swapped out our PC CRTs. I still remember playing CS 1.6 with friends in my parents’ basement. A LAN party with 6 adolescents. We all had CRTs, except for one friend who used an early-generation TFT. During that time, I had to ask my father every time I needed to move the monitor – it was simply too heavy for me. We still played on LAN parties later, when everyone had switched to TFTs. I also remember playing Half-Life 2 on an early TFT. But what happened? Why did everyone switch from CRT to TFT? Nearly all my memory on that topic is gone. Last I can remember is that those early 1024x768 TFTs were kind of slick, cool, or maybe “new”. It was the new “next thing”, and people liked the “new” stuff?

I‘ve decided to ask other people for their opinion. Co-Workers, friends and family. “Those were quite heavy and the devices were too deep” was the aggregated result about the death of picture tubes.

I personally would never care about the weight or size of something if there is no alternative in terms of quality. I also thought this would count for others as well. So what happened?

Were TFTs that much brighter? Were black levels in room-light conditions that bad? Was convergence a real issue even with high quality monitors? Was the sharpness of the picture not that good?

It seems especially the last question really depends on the used resolution.

I started to grow more into this topic and while I do own 2 Amiga monitors which are display devices for PAL and NTSC 15 kHz video signals, I haven’t used a PC CRT for quite some time. At the end of May this year I used eBay to gather some free CRT monitors for PC usage. The first one, a hp p930, was rather dim and thus not very helpful. Also the flat tube had linearity issues. The second one, a Siemens MCM 1706 (17”), was rather small but offered great brightness and a sharp picture as long as the resolution was not higher than 800x600. The tube could be also driven with up to 1600x1200@70Hz but the picture quality suffered badly. And so I experimented.

A thing of sluggish beauty. Left to Right: Dell 2412M, Asus PG279QE and Siemens 1706 MCM

 

When Carrion came out this year I was kinda fascinated that the internal rendering resolution was 640x480 while the frame rate was locked at 60 Hz. At the same time it was scrolling rather fast. This made the game look awful on my very expensive Asus PG279 but looked like a blast with the native resolution on the free 17” Siemens CRT. I was quite happy during that period of time that I had a CRT to play this game.

Games of the post-2003 era

Fast Scrolling Games...

While looking for games which could suit a CRT I noticed that most of the current games don’t scroll very fast. Recent 2D platformers like Hollow Knight or Bloodstained do have a rather slow scrolling pace. Almost like… they were optimized for monitors that are known to have motion blur.

One could say games have changed. Developers have adapted from the quirks a CRT had in the past (horizontal scanlines) to the quirks the current technology has (motion blur).

The Future

Now, 17” is not big measured by current standards. And either the focus unit or the shadow mask of my Siemens 1706 is not suited for higher resolutions. But there were other monitors like the Sony's GDM-FW900.

People seem to crave for this monitor. They want it back. High prices are paid for them. But the issue is that these are old. You don’t really know what to expect with probably aged tubes.

At this point I was wondering. Why is there no movement in bringing CRT monitors back. Are the disadvantages of the past still part of the present? How would the picture look like today?

I dream about a 27” G-Sync compatible CRT monitor with high resolution. But how high could the chance be to revive the machinery to make them? How high would the demand be? How expensive would this dream monitor be?

If I had more courage I would kickstart a new CRT monitor. But who am I? Just an embedded software engineer without any manpower behind. I could probably design the firmware, video processing algorithms, OSD, deflection control and all that stuff that would belong to such a device. But the rest?

Glass, Vacuum, Chemical stuff with Phosphors, Etching of Shadow Masks and analog circuits. Combine that with the complex process of actually getting phosphor dots on the screen.

It’s too complex for one person.

Conclusion

Maybe this dream stays a dream. Maybe I currently have a weird quirky phase. But the state of the art of displays make me angry. Sample & Hold type of displays need to leave the gaming market now and make place for something better suited for moving pictures.

TFTs still have their place. In offices to read text with great font clarity. But for the rest?

OLED monitors are still not available and who knows when they finally arrive and whether they will solve the problems.

Micro LED is a thing of the future and there is no first monitor in sight.

What are you thoughts? How do you like your games?

Slamy