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Comment by koyote

15 hours ago

Early 90s maybe. By the end of the 90s and definitely early 2000s CRT screens were 1024×768 for the cheap crap and 1600×1200 for the high-end (with 1280×1024 as a mid-range).

Yeah sure you can take a machine with only 4MB of video memory and try to draw a 1600x1200 CRT, but you're not going to be able to have that many colors.

It often wasn't a limitation of your monitor, it was a limitation of your video adapter. Rattling off some common specs of monitors isn't telling the full story of what most random people were actually experiencing.

I still remember having to upgrade our main home desktop at the time of Warcraft I I'd release because it didn't have enough video memory to meet the 8MB minimum needed. That was in 2002 on a machine purchased with XP, a Pentium 4 HT with 512MB of system memory. Not necessarily a low end machine, but obviously not a gaming PC at the time and much newer than many systems sold for Windows 98.