@@oetproductions8101 nobody on a restricted budget is going to spend a grand on this thing and then hundreds of dollars more on cables and adapters to plug it into a CRT.
I actually used to play beamNG like this, because before I got a dedicated GPU (this was a long time ago) I used to have to play beamNG at 480p and I found that it looked better on my 480i Bush CRT telly that I used for my Commodore 64 and NES. I already happened to have a vga to composite adapter so I did actually play the game like that for a year or so as the game looks at 9:32, expect I resized the hud so it a normal size and had to run the game still at lowest settings as it was a 4th gen iGPU. Running the game at ultra settings on my GTX 980 now is soooo much better but I still look back on that fondly. I do however still daily drive duel HD CRTs (mostly because they are very cheap for how good of an image you get) + an old LCD (1024x768) monitor. The main monitor is 1600x1200 @ 65Hz but sometimes its quite fun to run fps games at 480p @ 160Hz cause you can do that on CRTs!
I used to daily drive 2 x 21" Trinitrons at 1600x1200, it felt great 15 or so years ago, but I can't imagine still using this today, do you do this mostly for gaming? Or any productiviyt? Right now on 2 x 30 (2560x1600) and 2 x 24 vertical mount (1920x1200).
@@macosx10.7lion4 I honestly don't see it. I really do with my 50Hz PAL TV and it hurts my eyes after a couple hours but my monitors have always been fine weirdly.
@@dualboy24 I use them for everything, school work, gaming, watching films and youtube, programming etc. The resolution is high enough I don't have any issues and the colours are really good. I mean i'm using it now!
It really shows how little push Bethesda has given in terms of the game's backend. It's so obvious that they're barely moved on from Morrowind that the game *prefers* CRTs and low resolutions over modern HD displays.
This scratched an itch i've nearly forgotten about. Back when budget building and lowspec content was popular on youtube and folks would go to great ends to play modern titles on old hardware, usually requiring modding ini files, hex editing, changing drivers and res, crazy workarounds etc. This really hit that feel again, even though it's a different kinda thing. Very fun!
CRT gamer here, I love using old PC monitors cause you can push them really hard for great effects like 800x600 at 160hz and 1024x768 at 140hz and super crisp looking 2048x1536 at 90hz - I often use my CRTs to run raytrayced games at high framerates without DLSS as well as old gems - funny thing I have a pretty powerfull system but I just love CRTs and retro games - I own 11 CRTs (monitors TVs and PVMs) I love the video btw
This is amazing! I wish I still had some reliable CRTs. I’ve shied away from getting an old usedone because I’m a wuss and scared of them, well, exploding in my face.
DLSS FSR and XESS is almost lossless on a CRT i run Cyberpunk with Full RT at 2048x1536 at 100hz on my old trinitron with the balanced FSR 3 with Framegen to keep the .1 percent lows above 80fps
@@cnctcat I have a very powerfull DAC (a over 500Mhz one) so I can push 2880x2160 at 60hz - with that you can guess which monitor I own because there is only one CRT produced capeable to such resolutions - I also use a DP to VGA adapter for my crt monitors (little to no lag) - I also have a Win XP machine with a powerfull GTX card, the last one to come with analog video out and full windows XP support for drivers -colors on CRTs are just mind blowingly good I have two studio displays with 100% adobe RBG and they are just stunnig - I use them still for photo editing in lightroom
For $989 you can probably find an AMD Ryzen-based miniature PC which packs way more punch and you can install Bazzite (SteamOS) on it out of the box, with AMD's integrated graphics. You''ll have better performance than a Steam Deck. I'd honestly want to see a decent comparison between this IGPU and the Deck.
No much point, Intel already released the 200 Lunar Lake series that are way better than this, even better than the AMD ones. Even upcoming Arrow lake for Desktop should be more or less decent.
@@simonupton-millard second hand/open box ROG Ally would be far more suitable. I own both and the Ally is far more potent for pushing a monitor at decent frame rates, tis my daily driver desktop. 😂
I'm glad I kept my best one, a 27" Trinitron. It even has a woofer built into the back for more bass. I also kept a 19" with a DVD player and VCR. But I did send my 21" Trinitron computer monitor off to e waste... That was a great monitor in retrospect, it didn't deserve that.
Saying that the picture had depth and realism isn't a dumb thing to say. It's always been true of dark tube curved crts. It was (along with the fact that the image is made from dots which is like free anti-aliasing, and the response times/input lag being non-existent) CRT's primary advantages over other technologies. And it's still true today. It's kind of a shame that CRT's didn't maintain a following that was large enough to keep them commercially viable.
@@volvo09 Green showed well. But CRT's have a lot of issues with red. It's actually a big factor in how a lot of older stuff was color graded for production.
@@stevethepocket Unrelated. That's more to do with Digitial to analog conversion and chromasubsampling. If you have a good converter, or a good upscaler thats not really an issue.
Good video. I did something like this at a friend's house. They had a 40" Sony tv "Digital LCD TV" (20yrs old?) in their spare room that was 720p. It was probably "Top of the line" when it was released. A gtx 1060 6gb is still a powerful card at 720p, lol!
I sold my brothers 40" inch trinitron for $700 about 8 years ago and regret it every day. That thing weighed 250lbs. I got into 1940s and 50s TVs, tube amps and stuff. Before I sold it i opened it and tweaked up the colors and it looked better than ever. His Comcast friend gave us a hacked modem in 2001. I used to play burnout3 and area51 online ps2 on it.
The 14 inch trinitron was the display for my Commodore Amiga, excellent display, perfect for the bedroom setup and definitely a long way from my original ZX spectrum 48k setup, on a 12 inch black and white TV!
CRT was magic in itself. Somehow managed to multiply information contained in the picture. All those old games that look low-res and grainy on modern displays, yet they were super smooth on CRT.
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial That sucks, usually they just destroy the power supplies. Thankfully the power supplies are easy-ish to change and the watercooling can be downgraded to aircooling or upgraded to newer watercooling.
It runs the remaster about as well as high end cards at the release of the original. I still remember 8800 Ultra 3x SLI pulling like 45 fps in 1280x1024.
I tried something like this YEARS ago and was astonished how good the image was. If we only had modern CRT technology today ... Am I the only ine who wants CRTs coming back?
Actually lots and lots of people want new CRTs and it is recurring discussion topic on CRT-oriented internets. Same for other long gone technologies like plasma - especially when someone sees something like Pioneer Kuro PDP-LX5090 - which BTW is as close to CRT looks as you can get with CRTs.
Super cool video! Always love seeing people experiment with CRTs and doing weird stuff like that! I've played with interlaced a whole lot myself, but only high resolutions like 4K interlaced at 80Hz on big CRT PC monitors. That said, something import to understand here. Your PC was NOT outputing 480i here, but very much 480p. The signal coming out of your Intel iGPU throughout this whole test was regular 640x480 progressive and definitely not interlaced. Games struggle to deal with interlaced in general these days, but here everything was fine, because it was not interlaced on the PC side of things. The TV though was indeed getting an interlaced signal on its input and showing 480i on the display. But that was the job of the adapter you are using, taking the 480p signal (or whatever else comes off the GPU, like at the beginning of the video) and scaling it to 480i. When you send 480p from the PC, then the 480i conversion is technically pixel perfect indeed. Note that there are no current GPU driver able to output interlaced across all major GPU brands, through the Intel iGPU hardware is cappable of it. Interlaced support on Intel (Intel UHD 700 series iGPUs, Intel DG1 dGPU, and Intel ARC Alchemist iGPU/dGPU) stopped mid January 2023. It means that, if you want to run interlaced resolutions natively on Windows from either the HDMI or DisplayPort outputs of your Intel graphics card, you need to downgrade the driver to an earlier version dating early January 2023 (I was using version 31.0.101.3975, maybe a slightly newer one works, I forgot). I did not test laptop processors iGPUs, only the UHD 730, the Intel DG1, and the ARC Alchemist desktop family. ARC was very limited in comparison, at least with high interlaced resolutions, for low interlaced resolutions I believe it would be good. I did not test that too much. The DG1 allows to use basically the equivalent of the Intel UHD iGPU, but with AMD Ryzen systems, though I do not recommand the DG1 with old drivers, it's a huge mess to get it to work right, but when working it does a good job. Both the UHD 730 and the DG1 allow super high interlaced resolutions like 3840x2400i at 80Hz interlaced to be sent to a high end CRT monitor (like the FW900, I wrote a report on Reddit about that). On high end CRTs, it makes for an absolutely stunning, silky smooth and very very sharp experience (unlike what people could think, talking about old CRTs). Slightly less high resolution, and more realistic, was 2560x1600i at 144Hz (16: 10 tested on FW900), or 1920x1200i at 170Hz (4: 3 tested on F520). For lower resolutions, I fall back to progressive, because interlaced lines are invisible at high resolutions, it looks exactly like progressive (above what the tube can realistically resolve), but trying 1600x1200 interlaced for example, it's quite obvious that it is interlaced and it gets distracting/annoying (some people might appreciate the look of it though). So 1600x1200 for example would be limited to 111Hz progressive, compared to 210Hz interlaced on the Iiyama Vision Master 514. Huge difference, so it's a choice. Note that the point of running high interlaced resolutions from an Intel iGPU, is to use GPU passthrough, with a bigger graphics card like an RTX or a Radeon doing all the game graphics rendering, and passing it to the Intel card for display. Otherwise it would not make sense of course. For progressive though, no need for any of that mess, direct output from any recent GPU, via a proper hign bandwidth DisplayPort or HDMI to VGA adapter, and that's it! Anyways, that's why I love CRTs! The monitor itself does not dictate the resolution you need to use, like for example a recent monitor that is native fixed 2560x1440. If you want to display 1920x1080 it becomes a blurry catastrophe (I will never do that, ever), or it takes a small portion of the screen to be pixel perfect, no scaling. The CRT lets you do absolutely whatever you want, going down to 640x480 at crazy 240Hz if you are willing to risk it haha. Sure it's not 1440p 240Hz, but it's not the same kind of fun here haha. Keep up the CRT fun!
Not only CRTs but also composite. NES/Famicom is amazing example where if you do RGB mod you might see some games and be wowed by improvements but in some other games it is plan best to play them in Composite e.g. Barman - definitely example of a game where Composite is the best. Move to RGB and it looks much worse - instead of intricate high resolution graphics you see patterns. Move to modern-retro looks of square pixels and graphics look dull.
this channel, this video is wonderful, immaculate...the background music is making me think that phones and timers and microwaves are going off all across my house...and I don't suffer from OCD or anything...that I know of...apologies for the lame comment
I love CRTs but I had no clue that modern Intel GPUs still supported interlaced resolutions considering that Nvidia dropped support back in the 20 series of their GPUs. I don't know the situation with AMD as stuff like the PS5 can still output 1080i strangely while it dropped support for 480p with the PS4 Pro. I have to test and see if my AMD iGPU equipped handheld can do interlacing or not
I have a vivid memory of playing Wreckless - The Yakuza missions on the OG Xbox on my CRT TV and being blown away by the realism in the graphics. The move to LCD has made such realism in graphics much harder to achieve because the image is so clean but the CRT really does bring a certain magic to the image
Switched from a Ryzen7 5700G to an i5-14500T last week and the 770 UHD is pretty good. I play Xonotic at 1440p and I'm pretty impressed with the little Optiplex 7020 micro.
When I started PC gaming I used to play games @ 320 x 200. 640 x 480 was considered high res. Mind you, 14 inch CRT monitors were the standard back then.
Same here. 640x480 if your Pentium managed to run game at playable 15-20fps looked absolutely amazing. You could cut your retinas with how sharp pixels looked :D Now it looks so blurry... but then again I would say that for especially older games the best way to enjoy them are lower resolutions on VGA CRT. I would even go as far as 512x384 for something like Quake1, 2, etc - just throw highest AA, preferably SSAA or even downscale from much higher resolution), 16xAF and run it all at high refresh rate and it all looks so nice and soft.
This is how I played games back in the day. Instead of running it at full 640x480 you reduce the playable area down to a box until your processor stops choking on the load.
While watching this, my mind immediately went to all the late nights I was up and playing classic Resident Evil titles on my old tube TV. I would love to see how the Resident Evil or Dead Space remakes would do on this setup.
I would appreciate a small guide here on how you were able to get Interlacing resolutions from an Intel Arc iGPU. Most of the guides online are outdated, and lots of drivers nowadays intentionally block interlacing, making trying to get in working on Windows 10/11 very annoying.
This would be a very good way to play older titles or for emulation. Never thought I would ever see anyone try and attempt 480i on a modern mini box system.
I'd be very interested to see how Linux gaming performs with this setup; namely one of the various SteamOS-like distros (chimera, bazzite, holoiso, etc...). I love CRT gaming! So keep it up lol
Standard CRT TV's naturally soften the image and hide imperfections because of how they work so running a modern game on one is still going to look great. I remember playing GTA 4 & 5 back when they came out on my old 14" TV
Nice video! I believe you could get even better looking results with an RGB signal using adapaters like the VGA2SCART or ultimatemister's Ultimate VGA to SCART; if your TV supports RGB of course, which I think most likely does. Sure, with such a computer you'd also need an HDMI to VGA adapter, but some cheap ones can produce a very clean signal. And you would also need to make sure that the resolution sent is always the right one, unless you'll have no image at all (and I also believe some older CRTs had not protection so giving them an unproper signal with too high of a sync could really damage them, their seems to exist one protection dongle device though). Anyway, I've been thinking about trying this for a while with my CRT TV, and I think that your video gave me the spark I needed to actually do it! 😂
I mean this being the best way to play Fallout 4 is just so Bethesda... Of course playing it in 480i resolution on an old CRT using the iGPU on a mini PC to drive it is the way to go... Makes perfect sense...
Heh, I have an old HP Prodesk 600 with an i3-6100 that I have hooked up to a 24" Sony Trinitron (KV-24FV300) using display port to HDMI, and then HDMI to composite. I haven't tried any modern games on it, but old retro stuff runs like a dream! And even basic 720p RUclips videos look amazingly vivid, even going through multiple converters!
These Mini PCs can be surprising powerful. I have had my minisforum Ryzen 9 7940hs for about a year now and it plays games at 1080p reasonably well. Integrated graphics have come a long way from how bad they use to be.
This is actually a very good option for emulating consoles, probably including Xbox360 and PS3! Probably at even higher resolution, maybe 1024x768? And seems like a very good mobile gaming computer option if you travel a lot! I am curious about the power consumption though, maybe this along side a small display can be powered by a small battery if you are in a camper van?
CRT TV's look so much better because of how quickly the electron beam can hit the phosphor layer and how quickly light intensity can increase and decrease. Basically the response time is potentially anywhere between 1 μs to under 5ms (a real 5ms peak intensity to black) depending on what intensities are being used, you in theory have an unlimited colour depth because of this, three beams mean RGB can at any level of intensity almost instantly. You're seeing the game in its real colours (when your TV is calibrated) where as you just dont get that on any flat panel yet.
Reminds me when I tweaked a VGA to scart cable, hooked to a Matrox G400 able to output 768x576i. The picture was crisp and the PC played divx fine. Then I bought a flat screen with HDMI inputs
I usually tell people, when they're making a build - on a budget - to build for the monitor they have or plan to have. My first build, back in 2019 - after a 15 year break from desktops - was for a LED/LCD (cannot remember which) HD ready 768p TV, that could run at 105 Hz. And since I only planned an HTPC and older games, it was an Athlon 200ge build. xD
That was always the big benefit of CRTs. Sure, still frames and especially text aren't as sharp simply due to how the picture is made. But you can play at any resolution just fine. Do that on a TFT and you end up with a blurry picture, because it has to be scaled up to whatever the screen does natively. And in the CRT days it was pretty normal to keep settings up and drop resolution. The equivalent of playing on 720p ultra instead of 4K low. So any of these low resolutions be it 800x600, 640x480, or even lower, will look better on a CRT than a modern HD TFT. But I would check the overscan settings. The edges of the image run off the edges.
overscan on crt *televisions* is normal, it's just that all games designed to run on them would specifically avoid putting ui elements close to the edges, whereas modern games and pc software in general (crt pc monitors specifically were always designed to show the whole picture) don't generally bother
Ye know), to get 60fps from a CRT TV, you gotta be running at 240p. I expect it done by next week. In all seriousness, though, I really doubt what you're seeing was composite quality, since SCART uses the same signals as VGA but at 15.5KHz horizontal, so it'd be analogue RGB which is a far superior picture.
I still have a HP Pavilion MX704 CRT monitor. It can do up to 1280 x 1024 resolution. Even lowering resolution on a CRT can really make recent lower spec PC graphics look decent.
I am not all that surprised that Fallout 4 runs better in 480i on a CRT than a modern high resolution display. As you said it is basically built on the same Frankenstein-engine that built Morrowind called Gamebryo that Fallout 4's Creation Engine is based on! Classic Bethesda!
Things like this are perfect for games that have physics tied to the framerate. Like Fallout 3, NV, Oblivion, and Skyrim Legendary Edition. Heck, I have my laptops integrated graphics set to take over for the Nvidia GPU for these games.
A properly working CRT still rivals high-end screens in color depth and responsiveness. Have a little 14 inch Sony that I use on the regular. And it’s not just games: Old TV series that were formatted for a 480i display look fantastic as well.
I still have a CRT next to my recliner I use for things like old consoles and even have a windows 7 pc with a core2quad and a 1050ti (it was a spare gpu I got for free from evga from converting folding@home points to evga bucks :)) and found it actually really great for playing games at low resolution or watching streaming tv shows and such. Granted it mostly sits dormant, but from time to time I'll play some older games on it, and it looks great. Especially when downsampling like 4:3 aspect ratio. I even hooked my steam deck to it and it was pretty great.
This was magnificent, I really need to hunt down an old CRT monitor as well as a nice TV ASAP, and a backup power supply with filtering and what not, I don't trust my electricity company.
Technically speaking, at least with PAL TVs that can also do PAL60, you can even use 1024x768 as the resolution instead of just 640x480 / 720x576. But I don't know if it works with NTSC TVs too
I thought this was going to be a review of a n97 based system when I saw a mini PC and the CRT on the thumbnail. Nice PC but the usual question is whether it is better than an equivalent cost AMD as a four figure price tag is still a pretty penny 🙂
This is actually how I get somewhat decent framerates and frametimes on my Steamdeck playing The Finals. Even if I only get a decent 40-50, it's good enough for melee builds Also you should try overclocking the CRT, I used a random old CRT TV and was able to get 140hz pretty easily with the CRU tool. It did fry the hdmi to scart faster but I bet it shouldn't be an issue with one that costs more than 2 bucks on aliexpress
have you tried "control" on a crt? i did actually play it on one, in 1024/768. the effects do work beautiful on a crt. a lot of moody games seem to work very well on the old cubes. i can imagine cyberpunk could look good as well, but maybe it is to detailed.
see if running 720x480i gets rid of those hiccups, as that's proper "standard resolution". most consoles displayed at 640x480 or similar to create a blank border and give the hardware more time to process.
I used to have a Sony triniton tv back in 1992 I used it play my amiga 1200 games which was cool spot zool eye of the beholder dungeon master and nightmare and it never let me down
native low resolutions are so underrated. low res on a high def monitor just doesnt work, its so bad. but an old 4:3 monitor at its native res looks soooo good 95% of the time. especially if its using dvi. old monitors have got to make a comeback for budget gaming!
I really like this one, however I must complain that music could be a little loud and made it hard to hear you. apologies for the nitpick, have a great day!
989 dollars? I think you could build every PC you’ve made on this channel for that and still have enough for a nice meal at Ramsay’s restaurant in London lol
So I guess this little TV is technically multiscan? Because 480i was NTSC resolution and you're in PAL territory. Was that standard for sets sold in the UK? Also am I correct in guessing that your converter box is outputting a "progressive" picture where a single frame is held in a frame buffer and sent over both subframes before pulling in a new one? Because if so, you were technically capped at 30fps.
I see what you did there. Very clever video, well done. I have at times considered doing something remotely similar, by using a 1080p monitor instead of my 1440p. To make my GTX860M run a bit better. Funny how you made RDR2 work. I don't have the game, but I have Fallout 4 and I refuse to run any mods for my games. I had a problem making it run at higher than 30fps (not much as I have a decade+ old laptop) full screen 1080p. One of the things I had to do was vaguely similar with the ini files and protecting them etc. Annoying. Dude, I would advice against showing footage from anything from the N word. Not safe. Thanks for the video.
This is the answer to heat and performance walls, they need better display technology that lets you run lower res and look good. I could use my 4080 for the next 20 years if this was achievable on new displays. Next test use dlss at 480i and see how it looks.
This channel is the very concept of pointless computing personified and I'm here for it.
Not pointless if u on a budget!
@@oetproductions8101 nobody on a restricted budget is going to spend a grand on this thing and then hundreds of dollars more on cables and adapters to plug it into a CRT.
Pointless is such a first world thing to say when governments elsewhere still running pentium 3s and 4s lol
@@abdou.the.heretic you do know what video you're commenting under, right?
Pointless if you are on 1st world country......
17:17 Bang and the dirt is gone! Quality wallpaper.
iGPUs running Crysis properly, Fallout 4 at a solid 60fps, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
I actually used to play beamNG like this, because before I got a dedicated GPU (this was a long time ago) I used to have to play beamNG at 480p and I found that it looked better on my 480i Bush CRT telly that I used for my Commodore 64 and NES. I already happened to have a vga to composite adapter so I did actually play the game like that for a year or so as the game looks at 9:32, expect I resized the hud so it a normal size and had to run the game still at lowest settings as it was a 4th gen iGPU. Running the game at ultra settings on my GTX 980 now is soooo much better but I still look back on that fondly. I do however still daily drive duel HD CRTs (mostly because they are very cheap for how good of an image you get) + an old LCD (1024x768) monitor. The main monitor is 1600x1200 @ 65Hz but sometimes its quite fun to run fps games at 480p @ 160Hz cause you can do that on CRTs!
How do you cope with flicker at 65 Hz?
I used to daily drive 2 x 21" Trinitrons at 1600x1200, it felt great 15 or so years ago, but I can't imagine still using this today, do you do this mostly for gaming? Or any productiviyt? Right now on 2 x 30 (2560x1600) and 2 x 24 vertical mount (1920x1200).
@@dualboy24I loved my dual 21" trinitrons at that resolution. I believe they would go to 100hz but the image got a bit soft, so I ran them at 85.
@@macosx10.7lion4 I honestly don't see it. I really do with my 50Hz PAL TV and it hurts my eyes after a couple hours but my monitors have always been fine weirdly.
@@dualboy24 I use them for everything, school work, gaming, watching films and youtube, programming etc. The resolution is high enough I don't have any issues and the colours are really good. I mean i'm using it now!
Fallout 4 running at perfect frame rates but only if you run it at 640x480 is entirely in character.
It just likes the CRT, Fallout says "do I smell a VACUUM TUBE?" and immediately complies.
It really shows how little push Bethesda has given in terms of the game's backend. It's so obvious that they're barely moved on from Morrowind that the game *prefers* CRTs and low resolutions over modern HD displays.
fallout 4 is locked at 60 fps because the game physics are tied to the framerate. it kinda breaks the game if you force it to run over 60.
@@pcefulpolarbear that's just a Bethesda classic
@@pcefulpolarbear the problem is not 60fps, it's maintaining stable frame rate
This scratched an itch i've nearly forgotten about. Back when budget building and lowspec content was popular on youtube and folks would go to great ends to play modern titles on old hardware, usually requiring modding ini files, hex editing, changing drivers and res, crazy workarounds etc. This really hit that feel again, even though it's a different kinda thing. Very fun!
CRT gamer here, I love using old PC monitors cause you can push them really hard for great effects like 800x600 at 160hz and 1024x768 at 140hz and super crisp looking 2048x1536 at 90hz - I often use my CRTs to run raytrayced games at high framerates without DLSS as well as old gems - funny thing I have a pretty powerfull system but I just love CRTs and retro games - I own 11 CRTs (monitors TVs and PVMs) I love the video btw
CRT for life!
This is amazing! I wish I still had some reliable CRTs. I’ve shied away from getting an old usedone because I’m a wuss and scared of them, well, exploding in my face.
You mean because of the analog input? That is usually th limiting factor. Also, the way colour CRTs work means that they do have a limit.
DLSS FSR and XESS is almost lossless on a CRT i run Cyberpunk with Full RT at 2048x1536 at 100hz on my old trinitron with the balanced FSR 3 with Framegen to keep the .1 percent lows above 80fps
@@cnctcat I have a very powerfull DAC (a over 500Mhz one) so I can push 2880x2160 at 60hz - with that you can guess which monitor I own because there is only one CRT produced capeable to such resolutions
- I also use a DP to VGA adapter for my crt monitors (little to no lag)
- I also have a Win XP machine with a powerfull GTX card, the last one to come with analog video out and full windows XP support for drivers
-colors on CRTs are just mind blowingly good I have two studio displays with 100% adobe RBG and they are just stunnig - I use them still for photo editing in lightroom
For $989 you can probably find an AMD Ryzen-based miniature PC which packs way more punch and you can install Bazzite (SteamOS) on it out of the box, with AMD's integrated graphics. You''ll have better performance than a Steam Deck.
I'd honestly want to see a decent comparison between this IGPU and the Deck.
Or for £300 just get a steamdeck and a dock
No much point, Intel already released the 200 Lunar Lake series that are way better than this, even better than the AMD ones. Even upcoming Arrow lake for Desktop should be more or less decent.
@@simonupton-millard second hand/open box ROG Ally would be far more suitable. I own both and the Ally is far more potent for pushing a monitor at decent frame rates, tis my daily driver desktop. 😂
@@shivanSpS mmm, but by how much? 30%? 50%?
@@jamesbrendan5170 Lunar Lake is around the RDNA 3.5 890M level, maybe 5% better sometimes but at a lower power consumption.
i regret sending my tube tvs to the e-waste.. oh what foools we were lol.
I'm glad I kept my best one, a 27" Trinitron. It even has a woofer built into the back for more bass.
I also kept a 19" with a DVD player and VCR.
But I did send my 21" Trinitron computer monitor off to e waste... That was a great monitor in retrospect, it didn't deserve that.
I think it's pretty poetic that when originally watching this while grocery shopping, it defaulted to 240p for no reason. The ideal way to watch.
Why does Doom 3 crash occassionally on Alpha Labs pt. 1 level?
Saying that the picture had depth and realism isn't a dumb thing to say. It's always been true of dark tube curved crts. It was (along with the fact that the image is made from dots which is like free anti-aliasing, and the response times/input lag being non-existent) CRT's primary advantages over other technologies. And it's still true today. It's kind of a shame that CRT's didn't maintain a following that was large enough to keep them commercially viable.
And the color depth was quite nice too, especially green.
@@volvo09 Green showed well. But CRT's have a lot of issues with red. It's actually a big factor in how a lot of older stuff was color graded for production.
I don't think it stopped being viable, there's just more profit in flat screens. Nevermind that the product was objectively worse, money money money!
@@exturkconner Ooh, I wonder if that explains why digital rips of old tapes always look off-color.
@@stevethepocket Unrelated. That's more to do with Digitial to analog conversion and chromasubsampling. If you have a good converter, or a good upscaler thats not really an issue.
Good video. I did something like this at a friend's house. They had a 40" Sony tv "Digital LCD TV" (20yrs old?) in their spare room that was 720p. It was probably "Top of the line" when it was released.
A gtx 1060 6gb is still a powerful card at 720p, lol!
I sold my brothers 40" inch trinitron for $700 about 8 years ago and regret it every day. That thing weighed 250lbs. I got into 1940s and 50s TVs, tube amps and stuff. Before I sold it i opened it and tweaked up the colors and it looked better than ever. His Comcast friend gave us a hacked modem in 2001. I used to play burnout3 and area51 online ps2 on it.
The 14 inch trinitron was the display for my Commodore Amiga, excellent display, perfect for the bedroom setup and definitely a long way from my original ZX spectrum 48k setup, on a 12 inch black and white TV!
CRT was magic in itself. Somehow managed to multiply information contained in the picture. All those old games that look low-res and grainy on modern displays, yet they were super smooth on CRT.
If you still have it, a Power Mac G5 retrospective would be cool, planning on actually editing some of my future videos on one for the hell of it
id love to have one of the quad g5 x serves to run linux on
@@cal2127 Honestly better off running a Mac Pro in that case, i love Power Macs but the PPC architecture is just not supported properly, even in linux
Sadly the watercooling leaked and destroyed the main board.
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial That sucks, usually they just destroy the power supplies.
Thankfully the power supplies are easy-ish to change and the watercooling can be downgraded to aircooling or upgraded to newer watercooling.
Damn, Crysis with RT looks *mesmerizing* on that little Trinitron
It runs the remaster about as well as high end cards at the release of the original.
I still remember 8800 Ultra 3x SLI pulling like 45 fps in 1280x1024.
I tried something like this YEARS ago and was astonished how good the image was. If we only had modern CRT technology today ...
Am I the only ine who wants CRTs coming back?
Actually lots and lots of people want new CRTs and it is recurring discussion topic on CRT-oriented internets.
Same for other long gone technologies like plasma - especially when someone sees something like Pioneer Kuro PDP-LX5090 - which BTW is as close to CRT looks as you can get with CRTs.
you can run most of the Unreal Engine 3, 4 and 5 games in a custom-sized window using the launch arguments -ResX and -ResY (e.g -ResX 640 -ResY 480)
I never saw this one coming. Then again, this channel is all about "expect the unexpected". Nicely done!
Fascinating video. I know the CRT is half the point, but seeing some direct capture would've been neat as well.
Are you (with over 250k subs) editing all your videos in Serif Movie Maker 6? Cos if you are, that brings a tear to my "if it ain't broke" eye.
Yes
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial phwoar.
6:10 my guy clicks yes on Norton. I like to live dangerous too, but you're a mad man!
Had to Alt+F4 the Norton installer
I saw that too, my heart almost stopped!
I love the bonkers things you do with hardware. II used to do odd things but nothing like this channel! Love it!
I can imagine the follow up to this video being
"Building a computer inside the box it came in"
Super cool video! Always love seeing people experiment with CRTs and doing weird stuff like that! I've played with interlaced a whole lot myself, but only high resolutions like 4K interlaced at 80Hz on big CRT PC monitors.
That said, something import to understand here. Your PC was NOT outputing 480i here, but very much 480p. The signal coming out of your Intel iGPU throughout this whole test was regular 640x480 progressive and definitely not interlaced. Games struggle to deal with interlaced in general these days, but here everything was fine, because it was not interlaced on the PC side of things. The TV though was indeed getting an interlaced signal on its input and showing 480i on the display. But that was the job of the adapter you are using, taking the 480p signal (or whatever else comes off the GPU, like at the beginning of the video) and scaling it to 480i. When you send 480p from the PC, then the 480i conversion is technically pixel perfect indeed.
Note that there are no current GPU driver able to output interlaced across all major GPU brands, through the Intel iGPU hardware is cappable of it. Interlaced support on Intel (Intel UHD 700 series iGPUs, Intel DG1 dGPU, and Intel ARC Alchemist iGPU/dGPU) stopped mid January 2023. It means that, if you want to run interlaced resolutions natively on Windows from either the HDMI or DisplayPort outputs of your Intel graphics card, you need to downgrade the driver to an earlier version dating early January 2023 (I was using version 31.0.101.3975, maybe a slightly newer one works, I forgot). I did not test laptop processors iGPUs, only the UHD 730, the Intel DG1, and the ARC Alchemist desktop family. ARC was very limited in comparison, at least with high interlaced resolutions, for low interlaced resolutions I believe it would be good. I did not test that too much.
The DG1 allows to use basically the equivalent of the Intel UHD iGPU, but with AMD Ryzen systems, though I do not recommand the DG1 with old drivers, it's a huge mess to get it to work right, but when working it does a good job.
Both the UHD 730 and the DG1 allow super high interlaced resolutions like 3840x2400i at 80Hz interlaced to be sent to a high end CRT monitor (like the FW900, I wrote a report on Reddit about that). On high end CRTs, it makes for an absolutely stunning, silky smooth and very very sharp experience (unlike what people could think, talking about old CRTs). Slightly less high resolution, and more realistic, was 2560x1600i at 144Hz (16: 10 tested on FW900), or 1920x1200i at 170Hz (4: 3 tested on F520).
For lower resolutions, I fall back to progressive, because interlaced lines are invisible at high resolutions, it looks exactly like progressive (above what the tube can realistically resolve), but trying 1600x1200 interlaced for example, it's quite obvious that it is interlaced and it gets distracting/annoying (some people might appreciate the look of it though). So 1600x1200 for example would be limited to 111Hz progressive, compared to 210Hz interlaced on the Iiyama Vision Master 514. Huge difference, so it's a choice.
Note that the point of running high interlaced resolutions from an Intel iGPU, is to use GPU passthrough, with a bigger graphics card like an RTX or a Radeon doing all the game graphics rendering, and passing it to the Intel card for display. Otherwise it would not make sense of course. For progressive though, no need for any of that mess, direct output from any recent GPU, via a proper hign bandwidth DisplayPort or HDMI to VGA adapter, and that's it!
Anyways, that's why I love CRTs! The monitor itself does not dictate the resolution you need to use, like for example a recent monitor that is native fixed 2560x1440. If you want to display 1920x1080 it becomes a blurry catastrophe (I will never do that, ever), or it takes a small portion of the screen to be pixel perfect, no scaling. The CRT lets you do absolutely whatever you want, going down to 640x480 at crazy 240Hz if you are willing to risk it haha. Sure it's not 1440p 240Hz, but it's not the same kind of fun here haha. Keep up the CRT fun!
I absolutely love CRT tvs, crips, fast, snappy, and many games were designed for CRT's.
Not only CRTs but also composite. NES/Famicom is amazing example where if you do RGB mod you might see some games and be wowed by improvements but in some other games it is plan best to play them in Composite e.g. Barman - definitely example of a game where Composite is the best. Move to RGB and it looks much worse - instead of intricate high resolution graphics you see patterns. Move to modern-retro looks of square pixels and graphics look dull.
this channel, this video is wonderful, immaculate...the background music is making me think that phones and timers and microwaves are going off all across my house...and I don't suffer from OCD or anything...that I know of...apologies for the lame comment
oh, thank goodness it went to piano and guitar...
It’s a tad loud and overpowers the voice in a couple places.
omg this is exactly how I played OG Crysis (in 2007 if I remember correctly) on my pentium D & geforce 8600gt, all ultra @ 640x480 on a CRT monitor :D
I love CRTs but I had no clue that modern Intel GPUs still supported interlaced resolutions considering that Nvidia dropped support back in the 20 series of their GPUs. I don't know the situation with AMD as stuff like the PS5 can still output 1080i strangely while it dropped support for 480p with the PS4 Pro.
I have to test and see if my AMD iGPU equipped handheld can do interlacing or not
This is exactly why I've always opposed benchmarking with low settings, for to evaluate the "CPU performance"...
I have a vivid memory of playing Wreckless - The Yakuza missions on the OG Xbox on my CRT TV and being blown away by the realism in the graphics. The move to LCD has made such realism in graphics much harder to achieve because the image is so clean but the CRT really does bring a certain magic to the image
Switched from a Ryzen7 5700G to an i5-14500T last week and the 770 UHD is pretty good. I play Xonotic at 1440p and I'm pretty impressed with the little Optiplex 7020 micro.
When I started PC gaming I used to play games @ 320 x 200. 640 x 480 was considered high res. Mind you, 14 inch CRT monitors were the standard back then.
Same here. 640x480 if your Pentium managed to run game at playable 15-20fps looked absolutely amazing. You could cut your retinas with how sharp pixels looked :D
Now it looks so blurry... but then again I would say that for especially older games the best way to enjoy them are lower resolutions on VGA CRT. I would even go as far as 512x384 for something like Quake1, 2, etc - just throw highest AA, preferably SSAA or even downscale from much higher resolution), 16xAF and run it all at high refresh rate and it all looks so nice and soft.
12:32 I often forget that fallout 4 was modeled after my state so seeing Lexington pop up was funny for me
Oh my god they have my old town as well after I looked it up
This is how I played games back in the day. Instead of running it at full 640x480 you reduce the playable area down to a box until your processor stops choking on the load.
While watching this, my mind immediately went to all the late nights I was up and playing classic Resident Evil titles on my old tube TV. I would love to see how the Resident Evil or Dead Space remakes would do on this setup.
I would appreciate a small guide here on how you were able to get Interlacing resolutions from an Intel Arc iGPU. Most of the guides online are outdated, and lots of drivers nowadays intentionally block interlacing, making trying to get in working on Windows 10/11 very annoying.
Interlaced CRT image quality is pure gold.
I knew some CS pro player who love playing with tiny Windows, and I bet he will happy to see this.
This would be a very good way to play older titles or for emulation. Never thought I would ever see anyone try and attempt 480i on a modern mini box system.
I'd be very interested to see how Linux gaming performs with this setup; namely one of the various SteamOS-like distros (chimera, bazzite, holoiso, etc...).
I love CRT gaming! So keep it up lol
GTA5 really was made for CRTs, I played it on the 360 at launch and man did it look good.
The dedication to thorough testing will always be one of my favorite parts of your content…The Benchmarks.
😂
Standard CRT TV's naturally soften the image and hide imperfections because of how they work so running a modern game on one is still going to look great. I remember playing GTA 4 & 5 back when they came out on my old 14" TV
I miss CRT. 480p and looks amazing
I'd honestly take this over having to DLSS the crap out of the resolution of modern games nowadays.
Nice video! I believe you could get even better looking results with an RGB signal using adapaters like the VGA2SCART or ultimatemister's Ultimate VGA to SCART; if your TV supports RGB of course, which I think most likely does. Sure, with such a computer you'd also need an HDMI to VGA adapter, but some cheap ones can produce a very clean signal. And you would also need to make sure that the resolution sent is always the right one, unless you'll have no image at all (and I also believe some older CRTs had not protection so giving them an unproper signal with too high of a sync could really damage them, their seems to exist one protection dongle device though). Anyway, I've been thinking about trying this for a while with my CRT TV, and I think that your video gave me the spark I needed to actually do it! 😂
I mean this being the best way to play Fallout 4 is just so Bethesda... Of course playing it in 480i resolution on an old CRT using the iGPU on a mini PC to drive it is the way to go... Makes perfect sense...
This video was a Bang-er all the way through, thanks for the upload
You are a madman! I use an HDCRT. But I haven't hooked my computer up to it yet
I love watching James May’s cousin do stuff with computers.
Heh, I have an old HP Prodesk 600 with an i3-6100 that I have hooked up to a 24" Sony Trinitron (KV-24FV300) using display port to HDMI, and then HDMI to composite.
I haven't tried any modern games on it, but old retro stuff runs like a dream! And even basic 720p RUclips videos look amazingly vivid, even going through multiple converters!
These Mini PCs can be surprising powerful. I have had my minisforum Ryzen 9 7940hs for about a year now and it plays games at 1080p reasonably well. Integrated graphics have come a long way from how bad they use to be.
I have a 27" Trinitron TV that I have a PC hooked up to. I use it for emulation and old programming, not modern gaming, but it works brilliantly.
You're right, the first time I've played GTA V was on a CRT, tho it was an HDTV at 1080i and it looked amazing.
This is actually a very good option for emulating consoles, probably including Xbox360 and PS3! Probably at even higher resolution, maybe 1024x768? And seems like a very good mobile gaming computer option if you travel a lot! I am curious about the power consumption though, maybe this along side a small display can be powered by a small battery if you are in a camper van?
CRT TV's look so much better because of how quickly the electron beam can hit the phosphor layer and how quickly light intensity can increase and decrease. Basically the response time is potentially anywhere between 1 μs to under 5ms (a real 5ms peak intensity to black) depending on what intensities are being used, you in theory have an unlimited colour depth because of this, three beams mean RGB can at any level of intensity almost instantly. You're seeing the game in its real colours (when your TV is calibrated) where as you just dont get that on any flat panel yet.
always a banger sir.. thank you for this vid
Reminds me when I tweaked a VGA to scart cable, hooked to a Matrox G400 able to output 768x576i. The picture was crisp and the PC played divx fine. Then I bought a flat screen with HDMI inputs
This video exemplifies why I love this channel. That and the glorious Matrox videos. 480i looks great on CRTs, unlike running it on modern displays.
This video is a milestone in computer technology.
I usually tell people, when they're making a build - on a budget - to build for the monitor they have or plan to have.
My first build, back in 2019 - after a 15 year break from desktops - was for a LED/LCD (cannot remember which) HD ready 768p TV, that could run at 105 Hz.
And since I only planned an HTPC and older games, it was an Athlon 200ge build. xD
That was always the big benefit of CRTs.
Sure, still frames and especially text aren't as sharp simply due to how the picture is made. But you can play at any resolution just fine. Do that on a TFT and you end up with a blurry picture, because it has to be scaled up to whatever the screen does natively.
And in the CRT days it was pretty normal to keep settings up and drop resolution. The equivalent of playing on 720p ultra instead of 4K low.
So any of these low resolutions be it 800x600, 640x480, or even lower, will look better on a CRT than a modern HD TFT.
But I would check the overscan settings. The edges of the image run off the edges.
overscan on crt *televisions* is normal, it's just that all games designed to run on them would specifically avoid putting ui elements close to the edges, whereas modern games and pc software in general (crt pc monitors specifically were always designed to show the whole picture) don't generally bother
Ye know), to get 60fps from a CRT TV, you gotta be running at 240p. I expect it done by next week.
In all seriousness, though, I really doubt what you're seeing was composite quality, since SCART uses the same signals as VGA but at 15.5KHz horizontal, so it'd be analogue RGB which is a far superior picture.
I still have a HP Pavilion MX704 CRT monitor. It can do up to 1280 x 1024 resolution. Even lowering resolution on a CRT can really make recent lower spec PC graphics look decent.
This is a super classic and it’s so fun to see a crt doing good things
I am not all that surprised that Fallout 4 runs better in 480i on a CRT than a modern high resolution display. As you said it is basically built on the same Frankenstein-engine that built Morrowind called Gamebryo that Fallout 4's Creation Engine is based on! Classic Bethesda!
Things like this are perfect for games that have physics tied to the framerate. Like Fallout 3, NV, Oblivion, and Skyrim Legendary Edition. Heck, I have my laptops integrated graphics set to take over for the Nvidia GPU for these games.
something to test is the majora's mask recomp. it has downscaling options and supports high framerates.
The 480i benchmarks 😂 I applaud your creativity!
This is the future, whose or what future, I couldn't say, but the future nonetheless.
Back in the day a trinitron monitor or an NEC Synchmaster was the high end. Now,they are available in some thrift stores for 10 dollars.
A properly working CRT still rivals high-end screens in color depth and responsiveness. Have a little 14 inch Sony that I use on the regular. And it’s not just games: Old TV series that were formatted for a 480i display look fantastic as well.
I still have a CRT next to my recliner I use for things like old consoles and even have a windows 7 pc with a core2quad and a 1050ti (it was a spare gpu I got for free from evga from converting folding@home points to evga bucks :)) and found it actually really great for playing games at low resolution or watching streaming tv shows and such. Granted it mostly sits dormant, but from time to time I'll play some older games on it, and it looks great. Especially when downsampling like 4:3 aspect ratio. I even hooked my steam deck to it and it was pretty great.
your "spare" GPU is better than my main GPU... I sad now
boy, the live studio band playing for the video are really cranking up the amps, must be jealous of your voice getting all the attention.
Sometimes, happiness is a warm electron gun.
This was magnificent, I really need to hunt down an old CRT monitor as well as a nice TV ASAP, and a backup power supply with filtering and what not, I don't trust my electricity company.
I still got a few tubes laying around. Back when 27-40 inches was big.
Technically speaking, at least with PAL TVs that can also do PAL60, you can even use 1024x768 as the resolution instead of just 640x480 / 720x576.
But I don't know if it works with NTSC TVs too
These old Sony Trinitron tv's last very long and the picture quality is pretty good .
I thought this was going to be a review of a n97 based system when I saw a mini PC and the CRT on the thumbnail. Nice PC but the usual question is whether it is better than an equivalent cost AMD as a four figure price tag is still a pretty penny 🙂
LOL the crosshairs weren't even centered in counterstrike, awesome lmao
This is actually how I get somewhat decent framerates and frametimes on my Steamdeck playing The Finals.
Even if I only get a decent 40-50, it's good enough for melee builds
Also you should try overclocking the CRT, I used a random old CRT TV and was able to get 140hz pretty easily with the CRU tool. It did fry the hdmi to scart faster but I bet it shouldn't be an issue with one that costs more than 2 bucks on aliexpress
another trick I see sometimes is people buying old 720p monitors for native 720p gaming.
No 1.x pixel stretching like on a 1080 monitor
Have you considered running bazzite on this? A tiny CRT console with steam OS would be awesome
have you tried "control" on a crt? i did actually play it on one, in 1024/768. the effects do work beautiful on a crt. a lot of moody games seem to work very well on the old cubes. i can imagine cyberpunk could look good as well, but maybe it is to detailed.
see if running 720x480i gets rid of those hiccups, as that's proper "standard resolution". most consoles displayed at 640x480 or similar to create a blank border and give the hardware more time to process.
Nice CRT. I have the GDM 400ps myself.
I used to have a Sony triniton tv back in 1992 I used it play my amiga 1200 games which was cool spot zool eye of the beholder dungeon master and nightmare and it never let me down
native low resolutions are so underrated. low res on a high def monitor just doesnt work, its so bad. but an old 4:3 monitor at its native res looks soooo good 95% of the time. especially if its using dvi. old monitors have got to make a comeback for budget gaming!
I really like this one, however I must complain that music could be a little loud and made it hard to hear you. apologies for the nitpick, have a great day!
You need to try the latest AMD apus. 8000 series I believe. Apparently 1080p gaming on top titels is possible so would be interesting at 480i ha ha!
989 dollars? I think you could build every PC you’ve made on this channel for that and still have enough for a nice meal at Ramsay’s restaurant in London lol
So I guess this little TV is technically multiscan? Because 480i was NTSC resolution and you're in PAL territory. Was that standard for sets sold in the UK? Also am I correct in guessing that your converter box is outputting a "progressive" picture where a single frame is held in a frame buffer and sent over both subframes before pulling in a new one? Because if so, you were technically capped at 30fps.
I see what you did there. Very clever video, well done.
I have at times considered doing something remotely similar, by using a 1080p monitor instead of my 1440p. To make my GTX860M run a bit better.
Funny how you made RDR2 work. I don't have the game, but I have Fallout 4 and I refuse to run any mods for my games. I had a problem making it run at higher than 30fps (not much as I have a decade+ old laptop) full screen 1080p. One of the things I had to do was vaguely similar with the ini files and protecting them etc. Annoying.
Dude, I would advice against showing footage from anything from the N word. Not safe.
Thanks for the video.
This setup would be perfect for emulation, especially PS2.
There's been so much progress in video card, a basic Intel can play many things correctly now.
Remember the i740 compared to a Voodoo2 or a TNT 1 :)
You should try the Delock adapter, zero lag
finally, a resolution that does not embarrass my graphing calculator
This is the answer to heat and performance walls, they need better display technology that lets you run lower res and look good. I could use my 4080 for the next 20 years if this was achievable on new displays. Next test use dlss at 480i and see how it looks.