thatoneguy wrote: ↑14 Jun 2022, 06:38
DisplayPort first was came out around 2006-2008 and it could do 10.8Gbit/s at the time. Now fast forward 14-16 years later and that transmission rate has only increased by 7 times. If improvements continue at this rate it will take a long time for us to get uncompressed 8K 1000hz.
A useful data point on compression:
I have a Quest 2, and Quest 2 compression for Oculus Link (USB-C cabled connection, instead of AirLink) can be as high as 300 megabits per second in H.EVC. It looks perceptually lossless compression for 4K at 0.3 GBps for something that would be roughly ~20 GBps uncompressed (roughly ~4K-ish at 90Hz), although that fits the limited colorspace of the Quest 2 LCD.
That's almost E-Cinema territory bitrates. Netflix is barely over 10 Mbps for the same number of pixels, while Blu-Ray 4K can go almost 10x that for the video portion.
Based on that, if they develop the right compression algorithms, I'm pretty sure that roughly 4:1 compression of a future theoretical DSC algorithm is even more perceptually lossless than that, even for a much wider DCI-P3 or even Rec.2020 colorspace with perfect blacks, especially when pixels are much smaller -- the compression algorithm would be optimized in a way.[/quote]
thatoneguy wrote: ↑14 Jun 2022, 06:38
Bottom line is that enthusiasts are not going to accept spending a lot of money for a compressed inferior experience when they can get a CRT for much cheaper.
The CRT replacement dream seems a lot farther away than I thought.
That's fair. 8K 1000Hz is not going to be cheap for a long time.
thatoneguy wrote: ↑14 Jun 2022, 06:38
Full-on digital squarewave strobe at 8K+ 60hz seems a more attractive proposition to me compared to that.
We only need ~240Hz for software-based rolling scan to be a superior option (to many people) if it's OLED instead of LCD. it won't have as low motion blur as short-puslewidth squarewave strobing, but it would look superior (in CRT realism) to the LG C9 OLED 60Hz BFI.
Also, 4K still provides relatively decent HLSL simulation, 8K is just cherry on the top of the cake.
Although buying a CRT is cheaper today, the problem is that it's becoming harder to find good CRTs, as hundreds still get dumped at the recycle everyday (even in 2022, businesses clearing them out and residents clearing their attics in spring cleaning), reducing the number of CRTs available on the used market.
In ten or fifteen years, it will be far easier to get a 4K 500Hz OLED display that does a more more accurate spatial & temporal job of emulating a Sony PVM CRT than a worn-out semi-misconverged CRT that you had to drive 4 hours to pick up.
4K 240Hz has already arrived (LCD). But as we already know, OLED/MicroLED can really compensate to the point where 240Hz OLED looks clearer motion than 360Hz LCD (the OLED advantage is about 1.5x to 2.0x refresh rate, thanks to lack of visible GtG blurring added to the MPRT blurring). Also Samsung demoed a 240Hz OLED at DisplayWeek so 240Hz OLED panels are not far behind.
If you've seen MAME HLSL on a 4K 60Hz OLED screen, you already know that it looks fantastically kick-ass -- how the 4K is a massive improvement to CRT filter simulation. At this point, every phosphor dot on NTSC CRTs now becomes visible.
To get "Sufficiently superior to a used CRT in the 2030s used resale market" -- we do not really need to go straight to retina 8K and 1000Hz, superior-on-average-to-a-worn-CRT in all checklist (color, gamut, blacks, texture simulation, temporal simulation, etc, etc) is likely doable at 4K 500Hz, especially if it's OLED/MicroLED instead.
thatoneguy wrote: ↑14 Jun 2022, 06:38
You get uncompressed video/color space at the trade-off of more flicker but since for retro games you're far away from say a 20 inch screen then the flicker wouldn't be as noticeable, and if we're talking an arcade cab scenario where you'd be close to the screen then we could just settle for longer hold times like 3ms MPRT or so even if it would probably be inferior to CRT in that case.
For a game like Pac Man or Duck Hunt, you wouldn't need an ultrafast phosphor, as you would with fast-pan games like Super Zaxxon or Super Mario. Even those specific panning speeds are accomodatable to less than 1-pixel motion blur with a software-BFI-implementation on a ~500Hz OLED/MicroLED.
This is because of the low resolutions involved, e.g. 256x240, panning one screenwidth per second is only 4 pixels per 240p refresh cycle. The MPRT of 500Hz would be half a pixel of motion blur at that Super Mario Brothers / Super Zaxxon style panning speed -- which is still vastly superior to 4 pixels of motion blur when playing Super Mario on an LCD at full running-speed blast. Only very few games such as Sonic Hedgehog pans faster than those common arcade platformer/shooter panning speeds.
Even adding simulated phosphor decay would only affect that slightly, since it's a logarithmic fade. The next refresh cycle could be as 75% fade, and the one after, a ~95% fade, and so on. So it insignificantly affects the MPRT of one refresh cycle. And the fade curve can be custom tuned as a compromise between motion clarity and CRT simulation.
For the majority of games people want to play, 500Hz could easily be sufficiently retina to 90% of enthusiasts. Also let's consider that in ~2050, we'll literally have 50 year old adults who's never seen games on a CRT tube, so the venn diagram of CRT enthusiasts is sadly declining.
Regardless.
Early tests in CRT electron beam simulators have shown impressive promise -- it can actually begins to look superior to 60Hz 50:50 BFI early on, with just merely a 240Hz display, as long as your panning speeds are not too fast (seams still are visible -- like a super-blurry tearing where a tearline is vertically blurred by hundreds of pixels). But at slow panning speeds, it has the flicker feel and lowered motion blur, the hints of a temporal CRTfeel you normally don't feel with flat panels. So there's some promises already in early internal tests. I am going to release (by 2023) a very basic TestUFO CRT electron beam simulator for 240Hz OLEDs (coming).
We do not need it to look CRT perfect in order for it to be worth it -- refresh rates and resolutions have finally reached the point where basic CRT beam simulators can start to be superior to monolithic BFI for slow to medium pan speeds.
We must program accurate open source electron beam simulators
while people like me are alive, that automatically infinitely scales beyond my lifetime (looks better than BFI beginning at 240Hz OLED, looks very accurate at 480Hz, looks almost perfect at 960Hz, and looks retina at 1920Hz).
Just like HLSL automatically scales (looks more realistic on higher resolution displays it was never yet tested on), CRT beam simulators can automatically scale to more accuracy when more refresh rate is thrown at it. 240Hz OLED is coming, and 4K 240Hz LCD has arrived (Samsung). The bottom line is as we notch 1080p->2160p and bump 240Hz->480Hz and the bump LCD->OLED, is the only steps needed to turn a beam simulator into something that can begin to look really faithful for most retro content of non-superfast pan speeds.
I do not think anyone disagrees with beginning such an open source project -- I feel it must be done while people who grew up around CRTs and the golden era of 8-bit gaming.