Texture filtering: how do they look on CRT?

[Panzermann11]

The reception I've seen on texture filtering in retro 3D games like Quake seems to be negative almost all the time.

 

People tend to say it looks bad/ugly/blurry/like shit and other negative descriptors, and I virtually never heard any good thing said about it in the slightest. Thing is, most of us are used to LCD/OLED displays nowadays. I'm pretty sure texture filtering used to look way different on CRT displays like how pixel sprites are said to look better when viewed on CRT, but I sadly don't have a CRT to be sure. I even tried to find info and image comparisons on Google, but results didn't return anything good.

 

I wondered how texture filtering in CRT displays looked like, and the opinions of those who played games with texture filtering on CRT. Do they think it looked better, bad on CRT aswell, or somewhere in-between?

Edited December 18, 2023 by Panzermann11

[Lila Feuer]

Besides deep blacks that LCDs had forsaken there isn't any additional magic going on with older PC monitors, if there is then it's very very subtle unlike TVs back then.

Fun fact Doom 3 was most likely being developed on CRTs but right as the game came out LCD monitors had just taken over, so for all we know the game's darkness was literally pitch black in places.

I used to hate the filtering but don't mind it now...in 3D games, where there is little to no 2D elements. Sprite heavy games like Doom and others from the 90s weren't made with smoothing in mind and it really does ruin the pixel art. I can play with and without filtering in Quake 1 but prefer to play with filtering in Quake II because some things like the weapons look strange pixelated imo.

[Graf Zahl]

Back in the day it actually looked worse. The first generations of hardware accelerated graphics hardware worked with a 16 bit framebuffer to conserve memory and boost performance.

To compensate for the lack of bit depth this hardware offered dithering, so on a really sharp monitor you could see those dithering patterns all over the place.

On the monitor I had when Quake 2 was new these could clearly be made out.

 

[Panzermann11]

18 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

Back in the day it actually looked worse. The first generations of hardware accelerated graphics hardware worked with a 16 bit framebuffer to conserve memory and boost performance.

To compensate for the lack of bit depth this hardware offered dithering, so on a really sharp monitor you could see those dithering patterns all over the place.

On the monitor I had when Quake 2 was new these could clearly be made out.

 

So what you're saying is that texture filtering became slightly better over time, is that correct?

Edited October 19, 2023 by Panzermann11

[RDETalus]

On 10/18/2023 at 1:11 AM, Panzermann11 said:

Thing is, most of us are used to LCD/OLED displays nowadays. I'm pretty sure texture filtering used to look way different on CRT displays but I sadly don't have a CRT to be sure.

I think it may have more to do with the resolution, not display technology.

 

Texture filtering on a modern 1080p picture makes no sense, but that wasn't an option back then. Most people were running on 640x480. Maybe the texture filtering provided some visual benefits at smaller resolutions, perhaps the blockiness of the pixels became too ugly or distracting when viewing a distant texture. I can't test this theory though.

 

The closest I can come to testing this is putting texture filtering on GZDoom running at 640x480 resolution, and I think it looks better with it on.

 

Edited October 19, 2023 by RDETalus

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

Are we talking about CRT monitors or CRT televisions?

 

IIRC the PS2 had the ability to enable or disable bilinear filtering on PS1 games. It was really a crapshoot and depended on your TV more than anything. Turning on filtering would make some games look better on one TV and worse on another. I went through probably a dozen CRT TV's in that era, then I got a Trinitron. It looked better without filtering. I also used the Trinitron to play emulated games on my PC, I always disabled filtering. In terms of PC monitors, every one that I had was so fucking shitty that it hardly mattered.

[Lila Feuer]

I remember initially thinking that bilinear thing on the PS2 was so cool, then I saw visual artifacts introduced in Silent Hill.

[Panzermann11]

On 10/19/2023 at 10:39 AM, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Are we talking about CRT monitors or CRT televisions?

Any type of CRT display in general.

Edited October 21, 2023 by Panzermann11

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

1 hour ago, Panzermann11 said:

Any type of CRT display in general.

In that case it's kind of a difficult question - a good CRT monitor produced a much better picture than most CRT televisions. For example, you'll see a lot of debate about scanlines on CRT TV's vs PC monitors.

[mhmh]

The problem is nothing to do with the type of monitor.

 

Games like Quake used 64x64 textures (or even smaller) that had lots of fine, pixel-level detail in them; for example, this one:

 

 

When that's filtered via linear filtering, the texels are interpolated with their neighbours which causes them to blur and become smudged-out.

 

Quake also had a lot of rock and brick textures where the effect was less pronounced, but still noticeable once you knew what you were looking for.  The textures didn't look as crisp, and the colours were washed-out rather than popping.

 

At the time, linear filtering was all new and cool and shiny, and people simply overlooked (or didn't even notice) this as an issue.  The lure of the new was sufficient enough to do that.  Over time as texture resolutions got larger it was less and less of an issue, but at the same time people just started noticing the problem in older games.

 

Here are some other examples:

 

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

32 minutes ago, mhmh said:

The problem is nothing to do with the type of monitor.

 

Games like Quake used 64x64 textures (or even smaller) that had lots of fine, pixel-level detail in them; for example, this one:

 

 

When that's filtered via linear filtering, the texels are interpolated with their neighbours which causes them to blur and become smudged-out.

 

Quake also had a lot of rock and brick textures where the effect was less pronounced, but still noticeable once you knew what you were looking for.  The textures didn't look as crisp, and the colours were washed-out rather than popping.

 

At the time, linear filtering was all new and cool and shiny, and people simply overlooked (or didn't even notice) this as an issue.  The lure of the new was sufficient enough to do that.  Over time as texture resolutions got larger it was less and less of an issue, but at the same time people just started noticing the problem in older games.

 

Here are some other examples:

 

Your post is simply describing what filtering is (it is still helpful though, you describe it in a way that is direct and easy for people to comprehend, I don't mean to insult you). A CRT monitor vs a CRT television makes a big difference. Playing on a CRT TV with problems like poor color accuracy and pronounced scanlines vs a CRT monitor (even if it's at the same resolution of the TV) can be a huge difference in terms of how good texture filtering looks in a game. I know because I've personally experienced it. It is obviously all subjective, but how well texture filtering looks can even vary from TV to TV.

 

On some TV's (using the PS2 bilinear option as an example), filtering can make a game look like shit - it becomes too blurry and unreadable. On another TV, it might look like an improvement. On a PC monitor, texture filtering has a different effect for many reasons - the fact that TV's and monitors produce completely different images (even a cheap CRT monitor was much more crisp in general than a CRT TV) and even the viewing distance when using a TV vs a monitor. It can all be explained on a technical level, but in the end it is mostly subjective (I only say "mostly" because sometimes filtering can just make things objectively unreadable/unrecognizable) and whether or not texture filtering makes things look "better" on a CRT display depends on many factors - and an important one is always going to be the display itself.

[Kyle07]

I had also already the theory that texture filtering was looking better on CRT monitors due to the blending(?) of this technology.

I was born in 1993, so I grew up with CRT monitors and TVs, but to be honest, they were replaced in the 2000s and I do not remember CRTs that good anymore. So almost as I haven't ever seen them.

 

I was also a long time on the side for texture filtering. But then in the 2010s I recognized that the filtering removes details etc. and then I got used to the unfiltered look.

 

Its strange a little bit, but I think the PS1 also played a big role in here. Tomb Raider I from 1996 was maybe THE first 3D game I ever saw or played. I had it on PC, but played it also with friends or cousins on the PlayStation 1. Where for sure it was unfiltered. Don't know if the DOS version was also unfiltered, I guess so. So no wonder that I don't like the blurred and filtered textures.

 

When I played Half-Life 1 and Counter-Strike 1.6 in 2010, I also didn't like the texture quality. It was so poor for me, who was more used to graphics from the 2000s. I knew games from the 90s, but there were more cartoonish like Rayman 2 for example.

 

 

I think on CRT TVs it was for sure different, but I think it should be also kept in mind that the resolution also played a big role. For sure there were differences between 640x480 vs 800x600 vs 1024x768. And back then everything was connected through a VGA cable, which was tech from the 80s, if I recall correctly. I use nowadays a VGA cable for home office through my works laptop and I see definitely quality differences when I have my own PC connected to the same LCD screen via DVI cable. Its more crisp and clear.