 According to Wikipedia, there are 308 games for the Xbox Series X and over 3,000 titles to play if you count its extensive backwards compatible library. Wow, that's a lot and It's also less than half of the number of PC titles released on Steam each year for the past four years and one of the best things about PC gaming is that if you were to go back and re-explore some of those older games you might discover that some of them are very different experiences from what you remember. So that's what we're gonna be doing today. Sponsored by LG display who also provided what is arguably the best gaming display on the market their OLED Evo G1. I'm gonna be going back and playing some of my favorite PC gaming titles from years gone by each with its own special twist and each of them showcasing one of the amazing ways that the PC gaming community keeps these old gems alive. We're gonna start with a classic Grand Theft Auto IV and Linus you might say GTA 4 isn't that old? How can you call it a classic? But it actually launched in April of 2008 over 13 years ago and honestly speaking it shows. To be clear Niko and Liberty City looked great for back then but time steals the beauty from all of us doesn't it? Thankfully, there's cosmetic surgery. The GTA 4 beautification project is a combination of mods that upgrades everything from textures to NPC and vehicle models to even the graphics or lighting. Yeah. I mean for a game that I mean, I mean obviously it's not GTA 5 but like those are some very substantial upgrades. See you later buddy. I mean there's nothing you can do about the the ragdoll physics that haven't aged particularly well, but man this is the kind of thing that's obviously not cutting-edge triple-a quality for today, but what it is is acceptable. If a game came out and looked like this today, you'd say okay. Yeah, it's on a lower budget, but it looks fine. It's totally playable. The clouds are a little broken. Well, that's okay. We don't have to we don't have to look at the clouds. You know when you catch the okay that I was about to say when you catch it just right the light reflections off the water are actually not bad, but this is not optimal. What is this? Looks like slow-motion footage of someone like shaking a tray of jello. Weee! Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. So okay mods can't fix everything about older games, but still massive props to Boris Vorontsov for making ENB, the enhanced natural beauty project which covers this, Skyrim and some other games as well as Dpeasant 3, Dax 1, DKT 70, AP 84 and the entire community that has made this possible. This looks really good for a game from that long ago. Weeeee! Of course one of the key contributors to our better than ever experience is our OLED display here. The thing is no matter how sharp the picture is on a traditional LCD screen as soon as the image moves it blurs. That's because there's a small delay while each pixel changes color and this transition period is called pixel response time. Now because OLEDs don't use liquid crystals their transitions are near instantaneous. How instantaneous? Okay, watch this while I go grab something. Going back and re-experiencing in-game cinematics that blew your mind 10 or 20 years ago is almost always a major letdown. But one of the more recent trends in game modding has been exporting and upscaling these cinematics to match the resolution that we're now gaming at. And I think this example from Dragon Age Origins is a great one. They managed to juice them up to 1440p or even 4k 60fps in a way that looks surprisingly convincing. It's a really nifty idea and there are lots of tools that you can experiment with for yourself. You can see there's certain things that age a lot worse than others like anywhere they've tried to apply a depth of field kind of bokeh to the shot. It's pretty rough, but in areas where the original was supposed to be sharp, but it's just low res. It's a lot better. I'm back with this. Using an oscilloscope we can quantify the amount of blur to expect from a display by measuring the time it takes to transition between say black and white. On the left we've got a regular old LCD and on the right our LG OLED display. Now to find pixel response time we're using this blinking line test pattern and our oscilloscope to measure the amount of time between the black and white transition and vice versa. Impressively our OLED gets as low as 0.016 milliseconds compared to 4.9 for the LCD. Though it should be noted that if we were flashing a much larger portion of the screen we could get results closer to 0.1 millisecond on the OLED. And as we've already shown in the past this has a marked impact on image quality in the real world especially in faster paced games. Ah! I've put off playing this until we could make a video about it. We finally had an opportunity. This is it ladies and gentlemen from Vitor Villela who credits plenty of people in the GitHub page. This is Super Mario World running in widescreen. 16 by 9. And it would be easy enough to run widescreen just by shrinking the vertical resolution. That's the way that all the crappy games handle widescreen support. But no, they managed to modify the original ROM to- this is- and the excellent Beastness emulator to give you an expanded horizontal field of view. You can actually see more of the level than you ever could before. I want to at least get to a level that's at least like marginally challenging. Now hold on a second. I didn't even look that closely before. This is upscaled too, isn't it? There is no way Mario's butt wiggle is that high definition in the original game. I know right, except I'm gonna get crushed if I do it. Oh wait, I could. You can totally go ahead. That's not how the game's supposed to be played. Retro games like this are some of the hardest to re-experience. And a big part of it is that the way that modern displays work is fundamentally different from older CRT tube displays. Now we can get around some of this by enabling filters, for example, to add fake scanlines or otherwise recreate the retro look. But one of the hardest things to overcome is the dreaded input lag. You see, almost all CRTs accepted analog inputs exclusively that were immediately passed along to an electron gun that ripped back and forth, drawing the image on a phosphor-coated screen. Then along came flat panel displays with their digital inputs that required image processing for the best results. Now, there's no doubt that they look better, especially today. But if that processing takes too long, you could have pixels that change their values nearly instantly, like we saw with our oscilloscope, but you could still have an unresponsive gaming experience. That is where the LG G1 TV makes an excellent case for itself as the ultimate gaming display. 6.8 milliseconds on our Leo Bodnar input lag tester is less than a single frame at 120 hertz. A funny thing about input lag and early digital flat panels is that many of the games that were released while they were gaining in popularity were intentionally made less difficult because it just wasn't possible to achieve the same kind of pixel-perfect timing on these new displays that you could on the older CRTs. So going back and playing games like this, even if you don't mind the look, it can be impossible because you just, you can't time your jumps properly. Aww. No! Yes. Yes. Yes! The worst feeling ever, you get the first two right and you miss the last one like that. Now, one of the reasons that input lag has come up in conversation so much lately is because of cloud gaming. Obviously, if you're going to have a server that's somewhere... Oh! I'm good. Thanks, Yoshi. See you later, buddy. The additional step of sending all the data to and from the cloud adds a frame or two of delay at best. So while TVs have improved by a frame or two over the last 5-10 years, if the data center is 300-400 kilometers away, we could easily end up right back where we started. Which leads us perfectly to our next game because 1994's TIE Fighter was where it all began for me. For my birthday that year, I asked for my family's 386 to be upgraded to a Pentium One 166. That was the first time I ever upgraded hardware to play a video game. Now, we're flipping the script. We're upgrading the game to play my hardware. A massive community of modders has been hard at work completely remaking TIE Fighter using more modern assets, including ships, effects, and even the game engine itself. It's called TIE Fighter Total Conversion Mod, and I am extremely excited about it. Here it is, the X-Wing Alliance launcher. But then, wait, TIE Fighter? Yes, my friends. Because TIE Fighter was using such an old game engine, I mean, 1994, the mod is actually built on one of the sequels, X-Wing Alliance, from 1999. It's very different. Like, it looks freaking amazing. Hey, here we go! Alright. Oh, man. The, just like the space environments look so much better. Oh my gosh. This looks insane. You know what's funny? One of the reasons we picked this particular game, aside from that it was one of my favorites when I was growing up, was because it's a perfect showcase for inky blacks on OLED. But now, space isn't just just black. There's all these, like, nebulas and stuff. Look at this lens flare! Coming back to the deep blacks that you get with an OLED, there's another advantage for gamers. So one of the ways that LCDs combat OLED is through local dimming, where they will actually modulate the backlight in certain parts of the screen, depending on what is being displayed. The problem with it is that it requires the scene to be analyzed before its output, which can add, you guessed it, input lag. So because you don't have to do that on an OLED because black is just pixel off, it's just less processing that has to be done. This gaming is making me thirsty! LTTstore.com. One of the coolest things about running games in emulators is that, obviously, if I was playing PlayStation 1-emulated games back in, you know, the mid-2000s, computers have gotten a little bit more powerful. So nowadays, you can take something like Pete's OpenGL GPU Core and absolutely crank these older games. So we've got this probably a little overcooked in terms of filtering and upscaling and stuff like that. But look how smooth that looks! Like, this game, running by, okay, you can see the text is getting mangled a little bit. Text is not the best for upscaling. But let's see how the actual gameplay looks. Wow. Like I said, overcooked a little, but how sharp this looks is unbelievable. I mean, to be clear, the original graphics, they were fine for the time, but they were designed for a, you know, 27, maybe 32-inch TV, right? Anyway, for our final retro game, we are going back to what was arguably the prettiest of the next-gen first-person shooters released back in the mid-2000s. With Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Halo 2 all on the horizon, Far Cry came out of freaking nowhere, looked absolutely beautiful with its lush jungles and beaches, and kind of embarrassed them all by launching first. At least that's how I remember it. Maybe it looks like absolute garbage. Oh my God, this icon. I haven't seen this icon in 15 years. I am so excited. Now for this one, we're not modding it, but one of, again, the coolest things about PC gaming is that even if there's no texture packs or gameplay mods, going back and playing a game that you originally played on crap-tier hardware, I was running a Radeon 9600 Pro at the time, and just absolutely maxing it out can be a total blast. This is going to be this game, as I have never seen it before. One of the reasons for that is that it's made by Crytek, who has since become famous for, well, releasing games that no contemporary computer can run fully maxed out. Here we go. Okay, here it is. This is it. This is the moment when you first see, like, whoa, this game is unbelievable. Remember, guys, like, what we had seen up until this time, like, Unreal Tournament 2004 was considered a good-looking game, right? Oh, shoot, I only have two bullets. That's all Jack Carver needs. He doesn't need, like, some mega-supersuit. He walks up and he shoots you right in the face. This kind of vegetation, totally unheard of back then, and totally unheard of back then even playing this game, because you'd have to turn it way down in order to run it on the graphics cards that we had at the time. Okay, please tell me you have a sniper rifle or something. Oh, my God. Look at this. Oh, did I just get shot off the platform? You know what's a big challenge? Making a sequel to a game that has such a unique visual style, but still taking advantage of, like, you know, modern hardware. This was a ton of fun, and if you're looking for a new gaming display, I'm sure this video has given you a lot to think about, whether it's the black levels, the support for G-Sync and variable refresh rate, or just the lightning fast input lag and pixel response time, thanks to OLED, just turning the pixels on and off. OLEDs are a great freaking option, no matter how old or new the games you're playing are, and thanks to LG for sponsoring this. I had an absolute blast. Probably the only other video like this is the one where I tried every unplayed game in my Steam backlog. Though, spoiler alert, some of those games, there was a pretty good reason why I never bothered playing them. They're pretty bad.