Video Games Tutorials and News - The Best Thing About Pc Gaming - Retro Gaming On Oled
Intro
According to Wikipedia, there are 308 games for the Xbox One and over 3,000 titles to play if you count its extensive backwards-compatible library. That's a lot, and it's also less than half of the number of PC titles released on Steam each year for the past four years. One of the best things about PC gaming is that if you were to go back and re-explore some of those older games, you might discover that some of them are very different experiences from what you remember.
So, that's what we're going to be doing today, sponsored by LG Display, who also provided what is arguably the best gaming display on the market, the OLED Evo G1 display. I'm going to be going back and playing some of my favorite PC gaming titles from years gone by, each with its own special twist and each of them showcasing one of the amazing ways that the PC gaming community keeps these old gems alive.
Gta iv
We're going to start with a classic. Grand Theft Auto 4 and Linus Sandman You might say GTA 4 isn't that old. How can you call it a classic? It actually launched in April of 2008, over 13 years ago, and honestly speaking, it shows. To be clear, Nico and Liberty City looked great back then, but time steals the beauty from all of us, doesn't it?
Thankfully, there's cosmetic surgery. If a game came out and looked like this today, you'd say, "Okay, it's on a lower budget, but it looks fine, it's totally playable." The clouds are a little broken, but that's okay. We don't have to. We don't have to look at the clouds. You know when you catch the okay, I was about to say, when you catch the light?
Reflections off the water are actually not bad, but this is not optimal. What is this? It looks like slow-motion footage of someone shaking a tray of jello. Dax One, dkt70, ap84, and the entire community that has made this possible, like this looks really good for a game from that long ago. The two things that are better than ever before are: Experience our OLED display here.
The thing is, no matter how sharp the picture is on a traditional LCD screen, as soon as it moves it blurs. That's because there's a small delay while each pixel changes color. This transition period is called pixel response time. Because oleds don't use liquid crystals, their transitions are near instantaneous.
Okay, watch this while I go grab something.
Dragon age: origins
Going back and re-experiencing in-game cinematics that blew your mind 10 or 20 years ago is almost always a major letdown, but one of the more recent trends in game modding has been exporting and upscaling these cinematics to match the resolution that we're now gaming at, and I think this example from Dragon Age Origins is a great one.
They managed to juice them up to 1440p or even 4K 60fps in a way that looks surprisingly convincing. It's a really neat idea, and there are lots of tools that you can experiment with for yourself. You can see that there are certain things that age a lot worse than others, like anywhere they've tried to apply a depth of field kind of bokeh to the shot.
It's pretty rough in areas where the original was supposed to be sharp, but it's just low res. I'm back with this. Using an oscilloscope, we can quantify the amount of blur to expect from a display by measuring the time it takes to transition between black and white. On the left, we've got a regular old LCD and on the right, our LG OLED display.
To find pixel response time, we're using this blinking line test pattern and our oscilloscope to measure the amount of time between the black and white transition and vice versa. Impressively, our OLED gets as low as.016 milliseconds compared to 4.9 for the LCD, though it should be noted that if we were flashing a much larger portion of the screen, we could get results closer to 0.1 milliseconds on the OLED, and as we've already shown in the past, this has a marked impact on image quality in the real world, especially in fast-paced games.
Super mario wide
Ah, I put off playing this until we could make a article about it. We finally had an opportunity. This is it, ladies and gentlemen, from Vitor Villa, who credits plenty of people on the GitHub page. This is Super Mario World running in widescreen (16x9), and it would be easy enough to run in widescreen just by shrinking the vertical resolution.
That's the way that all the crappy games handle widescreen support, but no, they managed to modify the original ROM and the excellent beastness emulator to give you an expanded horizontal field of view. You can actually see more of the level than you ever could before. I want to at least get to a level that's at least marginally challenging.
Now hold on a second. I didn't even look that closely before. This is upscaled too, isn't it? There is no way Mario's butt wiggle is that high definition in the original game. I know, right, but I'm going to get crushed if I do. Wait, I could totally go ahead. That's not how the game's supposed to be played.
For example, retro games like this are some of the hardest to re-experience, and a big part of it is that the way that modern displays work is fundamentally different from older CRT tube displays. We can get around some of this by enabling filters, for example, to add fake scan lines or otherwise recreate the retro look, but one of the hardest things to overcome is the dreaded input lag.
You see, almost all CRTs accepted analog inputs exclusively, which were immediately passed along to an electron gun that ripped back and forth, drawing the image on a phosphor-coded screen. Along came flat panel displays with their digital inputs that required image processing for the best results now.
There's no doubt that they look better now, especially today, but if that processing takes too long, you could have pixels that change their values nearly instantly, like we saw with our oscilloscope, but you could still have an unresponsive gaming experience. That is where the LG G1 TV makes an excellent case for itself as the ultimate gaming display.
68 milliseconds on our Leo Bodner input leg tester is less than a single frame at 120 hertz. A funny thing about input lag and early digital flat panels is that many of the games that were released while they were gaining in popularity were intentionally made less difficult because it just wasn't possible to achieve the same kind of pixel-perfect timing on these new displays as you could on the older CRTs, so going back and playing games like this, even if you don't mind the look, can be impossible because you just can't time your jumps properly.
