Video Shows Why Older Graphics Looked Better on CRT TVs (2024)

A video making the rounds today shows off what 8 and 16-bit graphics look like on old CRT TVs versus modern TVs. 8 and 16-bit game graphics were noticeably better on the old CRT TVs some might have used to game on as a kid in the 1990s or even early 2000s. It’s not just nostalgia at play. Older games look better on the screen resolutions they were designed for.

Retro games have way fewer pixels than a modern screen can fill. Playing an 8-bit game that’s 256 pixels x 240 on a 4K TV that has a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 is asking a modern TV to display simple blocky images on a screen designed for much finer detail, and a lot of it. Since that old yellowed Super Nintendo is pumping out fewer pixels than the TV is used to projecting, the modern LCD TV has to expand the image several times over so it’s not a tiny little dot on the screen. This is called upscaling, which in the case of retro games leads to blurriness.

RELATED: Someone Built An 8-Bit Processor That Plays Its Own Games in Minecraft

This video, created by TikTok user @gxssxca, offers a good example of 8 and 16-bit video game art looking much more cohesive on CRT TVs while looking much worse on LCD/LED TVs. In the case of some images in the video, like the shot of Dracula from Castlevania, it retains a majority of the original's feel but the finer details on the hair and eyes blur together.

The problem modern TVs run into is when they’re trying to upscale an image that was designed for a TV that displays images with fewer pixels. Then it projects that image as a series of horizontal lines, which modern TVs do not do. It’s happening so fast that some gamers may not have noticed that old CRT TVs are displaying the images one horizontal line at a time, and are actually making every other line blank with a process called interlacing.

In other words, even those primitive video game images were too small for the CRTs they were being played on back in the day. They needed to be artificially expanded with those empty horizontal lines. Fancy modern TVs have no idea how to project these old CRT video game images, so it does the only thing it knows how to do: upscale, which creates blurriness, which makes Princess Peach look like she's melting.

MORE: Stardew Valley, Haunted Chocolatier Prove 16-Bit Games Can Still Be Popular