It Is Somehow Possible to Play Games at 4K on an Old CRT TV—And It Looks Amazing

CRT (cathode-ray tube) TVs are very popular among retrogamers, because old consoles and computers were made for that display technology and their graphics don’t look right on LCD or OLED screens. When it comes to modern games played on modern hardware, there is no reason to use a CRT — or at least that’s what I thought. It turns out that I was wrong, as Found Tech developed a method for 4K gaming on old CRTs and it looks amazing.

When I first watched this video, I thought it might be hoax. As far as I knew, CRT TVs and monitors never operated at resolutions this high and simply couldn’t. As it turns out, this isn’t a hoax and the reason it is possible is fascinating.

The LCD screen you’re reading this on has a resolution determined by the number of physical pixels it was manufactured with. But CRTs are different. They’re analog and create a picture by scanning an electron beam across the screen, line-by-line. The CRT resolutions we’re used to aren’t the result of a physical limitation of the display tech, but rather a limitation of the source. In theory, one could tell the CRT to sweep the electron beam across lines much closer together to increase the resolution.

That is exactly what Found Tech did here, but it wasn’t easy to achieve.

According to Found Tech, NVIDIA and AMD simply won’t let you configure the necessary video output using their graphics cards. That forced Found Tech to use an Intel iGPU to generate the actual video output, while an NVIDIA RTX 4080 did the rendering. Even then, Found Tech had to experiment with dozens of drivers and eventually found a program called Custom Resolution Utility (CRU) that let him set up the output properly.

The winning formula was a resolution of 2880×2160. That is interlaced, which is usually considered to be drastically inferior to progressive. But Found Tech reports that at this high resolution, interlacing effects disappear.

We, the audience, can’t really see most of the magic for ourselves, because we are looking at the CRT through a recording displayed on LCD or OLED screens. However, Found Tech says that it looks phenomenal. The CRT doesn’t have the motion blurring you get from modern screens and it blends pixels together in a really nice way.

The only downside is that the unusual hardware configuration is incompatible with a lot of games, including Cyberpunk 2077 and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Those have to run at a lower resolution — though Found Tech says they still look great.