Introduction

My high-resolution obsession started back in the CRT days, when most of my LAN friends were running small 14-inch CRTs. They were expensive, but LCD's weren't even in our wildest dreams in those days. I remember getting my first decent 15-inch CRT and thinking "yep, this is it - this is the sh**."

Back in those Quake and Unreal days, I constantly upgraded to make sure I had the best. 3DFX Voodoo video card? Come at me. First GeForce video card to give me 32-bit color in Quake III Arena? Bring it on. By Quake 3's release, I had a Sony Trinitron G520 - it cost me $3199 AUD at the time, but was the best CRT you could buy as a consumer.

1600x1200 at 32-bit color - and best of all, at 100Hz. This was amazing - it was liquid smooth and had me fragging everyone else so much better. But, I needed the hardware to keep up with 1600x1200, so things started getting expensive, and upgrades became more frequent.

I became equally as obsessed with high resolutions as I did with high refresh rates. In first-person shooters, high refresh rates were what made you play better than the others. Refreshing your screen at 100 times per second compared to 60 times per second made you see more, in between each frame, and much smoother during all frames per second, than your enemy.

It made using a PC feel even smoother than the already smooth CRT feel that professional gamers to this day still enjoy. Moving onto LCDs, I became tired of the low refresh rate that 60Hz offered me, but still persisted with my high-resolution dreams.

I began with a 15-inch LCD, and ended up buying more than one 17-inch, multiple 19-inch LCDs, an uber-expensive 20-inch LCD, a 24-inch Dell ($1300 at the time), and eventually settled on the eye-busting 30-inch monitor offering me 2560x1600.

After using LCDs for so long, you forgot that buttery smoothness that CRTs offered, so it became the norm to play at 60Hz, or 60 frames per second. The 30-inch monitor I purchased, the HP LP3065, cost me $3199. The same price as my 21-inch CRT monitor cost me all those years ago. I didn't mind - I was loving the 2560x1600 resolution.

But, my monitor obsession didn't stop there.