The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996

Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by bityard on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:05PM (#30948164)

CRTs, being analog, are theoretically capable of _any_ resolution. But in practice, most monitors were limited to between a few to a few dozen common modes. Toward the end of the CRT monitor's reign, most monitors could display higher resolutions than was really practical for their size, as the physical limit is the size of the "dots" that make up the phosphor layer. (Which is probably not at all the right terminology, because I'm not a CRT geek.)

The refresh rate compromise at higher resolutions was due to the limitations of the graphics card, NOT the monitor.

LCDs took a little while to catch up for a few reasons:

1) expense! It was hard and expensive to manufacture a display containing millions of transistors with an acceptable (read: profitable) failure rate.

2) colors! LCDs had a reputation for extremely poor color quality in the beginning. Blacks were medium gray at best and primary colors all looked washed out. Today's LCDs still have a hard time getting to "true black."

3) ghosting! Early LCDs had poor response times. Move your mouse cursor and watch it leave a trail across your screen. Fine for word processing and spreadsheets. Terrible for games.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by dylan604 on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:51PM (#30948787)

>as the physical limit is the size of the "dots" that make up the phosphor layer.

Another physical limit was the weight of the glass. The larger the display, the glass got thicker and thicker to "lens" the beam correctly so the edges/corners were straight. We had a Sony reference CRT for our film transfer/color correction suite that was a 32" HD monitor. MSRP was >$30k for it. (Sony's reference monitors were roughly $1k per inch in pricing.) The thing was stupid heavy requiring a minimum of 2 people if their names were Arnie; otherwise it'd take at least 3 maybe 4 typical post house employees. All of the weight was in the front.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by agumonkey on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:32PM (#30948544)

the CRT had no frequency limit ?

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by wtallis on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:59PM (#30948896)

CRTs had limits on how quickly the beam could scan across a line (and return to the other side of the screen for the next line), which imposed a tradeoff between the number of lines per frame and the number of frames per second. Within a line, the number of pixels per line was often limited either by the speed of the graphics card's DAC or the analog bandwidth of the VGA cable. But sometimes it wasn't, and you could take a monitor originally intended for something like 1280x1024 and get it to display 1920x1080 with acceptable sharpness, after adjusting the picture height to compensate for the changed aspect ratio.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by stjohnswarts on Thursday April 07, 2022 @02:59PM (#30948894)

Of course they did, the scan rate of the electron guns would be limited at some point. What that limit is I don't know but it was certainly finite.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by agumonkey on Thursday April 07, 2022 @03:16PM (#30949105)

I wonder which component who limit first.. the gun or the flyback driver.

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Re:The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy V... by postalrat on Thursday April 07, 2022 @07:07PM (#30951409)

I was figuring the magnetics that steer the beam.

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