The 1996 Hit Film, Crash

**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:00)
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Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome to the program. Hi. It's The Jeff Gerstmann Show for some point in late August. No, it's September 1st. Congratulations, you made it to September. You're one month closer to, I don't know. Video games, I guess. Video games, they're coming out over the next couple of weeks. And then, I don't know, we'll get to a point in November, and then they'll stop again. I'm Jeff Gerstmann, your host for this week's installment of the program. I'm very excited to be here, to discuss with you the future of the future of video games.
The current status of video games, I guess, is maybe the right way to put it. So I got my hands on a new monitor, and have been spending some time with a G-Sync Pulsar monitor. Now, Pulsar is the, you might remember this from earlier in the year. I want to say that we're showing these at CES, that would make sense, back around the beginning of the year.
And the Pulsar monitor is designed in such a way that it, the idea is that it's going to give you better motion clarity than other monitors. You know, in some cases, they're saying like, oh, it's going to be CRT-like motion clarity. And yeah, it does that. The catch here is like, okay, so it's like a 360-hertz monitor, and that's great. The monitor I replaced was also a 360-hertz monitor. The catch is that the Pulsar monitors can't be, at least with the way the current technology is, they can't be OLEDs. And so this is a traditional panel, and the darks are not as deep, and all of that. So you kind of do have that trade-off out of the gate, which has not been that major, that big of a deal, I guess I would say, at least so far.
The motion clarity thing is pretty f-ing cool.
I was actually pretty surprised by it. I've been wanting to get a look at it for a while, since they started reporting on it for a couple of reasons. One, what do modern games look like run through these things? Because that's the selling point, is they're like, oh, and they always show, because it's a display technology, so you can't really show video of it on the internet, because you're watching it on a monitor that can't do that stuff. And so it's a tricky thing to put in front of people. And so they have this shitty looking animated gif that shows like, oh, well, look at how blurry this shot of Counter-Strike or whatever it is, this shooter, and look at how less blurry this still frame is on a G-Sync Pulsar monitor. We took these with high-speed cameras, and you're like, okay, I guess, man, I don't know.
But the thing that got me kind of really wanting to see it was the idea of playing old games, emulating things on this screen. That was something that, I think it was the Digital Foundry coverage kind of right out of the gate was saying like, hey, actually, this might be really cool for that. They mentioned like the recent Shinobi game was Acts of Vengeance, Art of Vengeance, whatever, the most recent Shinobi game. Because it'll run at a high enough frame rate. That's kind of the other catch here is that there's sort of a minimum of frame rate. You have to hit before the Pulsar strobing, whatever technology will kick in. And I believe, so I've lowered it. The default is 90 I dropped it down to 75, which is as low as you can get it. And then there's a separate mode that'll work for things at 60 frames per second. But they kind of say, you might see some flickering, some flashing. Like there's a downside to the kind of lower frame rate, at least on paper.
And so this was the second beta weekend for Call of Duty. And so I played a little bit of that thing, which we'll talk more about that later. And I reinstalled Counter-Strike 2 and looked at some other kind of shooters. And it was like immediately noticeable, you know, like the clarity on the, you know, as you're kind of rotating around, you know, you go in, you turn off motion blur and all that stuff, which a lot of people do anyway. I've never really had a problem with it on traditional monitor setups, but to kind of fully gauge the state of this stuff, I kind of turned it off in most of these games. And it's impressive. I don't know that I would necessarily call it CRT-like, but that's mostly because it's been a long time since I've seen like a first-person shooter on a CRT, like, you know, a high-speed first-person shooter running on a CRT. So it's kind of hard to make some of those comparisons. Like people, yeah, I don't know, people in the chat now are like, ah, motion blur. Yeah, it's just, I don't know, man. I never, it was something, it has never bothered me in modern games. I don't know. Like it's something that like if your framerate is messed up, then the motion blur is going to look really crazy. But I, you know, yeah. And Valerie in the chat says, chromatic aberration off, maybe because I'm colorblind. Chromatic aberration, I think looks kind of cool. I never, I don't know, I don't know. I think it looks fine. I think it looks fine.