By now, we're all probably familiar with the race for refresh rates in monitors, with ridiculously fast levels being sought after these days, but how would you react if we told you that an older monitor can actually perform faster than today's fastest panels?
And by old monitor we mean a CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor – you won't have forgotten these if you've ever used one, but if you haven't, they're the ones you'll see in 80s movies that are the size of a small house (okay, we're exaggerating, but these are old and heavy units).
Incredibly, RetroGamingBase on YouTube has a video showing the Iiyama Vision Master Pro512 CRT monitor (from 2002) being pushed to an astonishing 700Hz (previous attempts have seen levels of 400Hz or 500Hz).
At 700Hz, it’s 30% faster than the current refresh rate champions, the 540Hz monitors from Asus and BenQ (the ROG Swift Pro PG248QP and Zowie XL2586X respectively). Even modern prototypes only hit around 600Hz, though there’s a more recent exception in a 1000Hz effort from TCL (on a 4K monitor, no less).
Okay, so at this point you might be thinking: what’s the catch? How can a 22-year-old CRT monitor comfortably outperform the best monitors of today when it comes to refresh rate? Well, the caveat is that the YouTuber reduced the resolution to a pathetic 320 x 120. (If you want to get an idea of how blurry that is, go to YouTube, put on a video, and change it to 144p quality – and even then, you still won’t get there.)
As Tom's Hardware, which spotted this, points out, any resolution higher than that would have meant the monitor couldn't handle the extremely high refresh rate without melting (well, without the image becoming unstable and generally jagged).
See in the
Analysis: Poetry in motion
CRT monitors may look like huge blocks of peripherals (and they may weigh a lot of weight, too), sitting on your desk and taking up all the space, but they still make for an impressive display, even these days, in one key respect: motion clarity.
CRTs have a softness that made us very reluctant to abandon them when thin, flat panels came along; we fiercely despised LCDs and their mediocre performance in shooter games when they were first introduced.
Of course, it’s a very different story now, but it’s still really eye-opening to see how CRTs can be pushed like this, even if the resolution drop is obviously a deal breaker for the overall experience and you can’t actually play games at this resolution, or even run Windows 11. The YouTuber will be trying to get around that, by using another monitor (a worse one that they don’t mind risking) and an older version of Windows, to try and run a game at 700Hz, so we’ll keep an eye on that.
As for the benefits of dizzyingly high refresh rates, well, that's a controversial topic. However, it's definitely a case of diminishing returns as you get to these kinds of stupidly high levels of Hertz (not to mention the difficulty of having a gaming PC powerful enough to hit such fast frame rates). Only really serious competitive gamers need this kind of refresh rate in their monitors anyway.
Anyway, as far as experiments in the world of computing go, this is one of the more astonishing efforts we've seen in recent times. It'll be really interesting to see if RetroGamingBase can pull off the promised feat of getting a game to run at 700Hz on an alternative CRT monitor.
