No joke: in the case of Grand Theft Auto V, that’s a low resolution that even CGA could do better than four decades ago!

CGA was the first colour graphics card by IBM. It kicked off a standard that was superseded by EGA and VGA in the eighties and nineties. But let’s get back to CGA. One of its graphical modes had a 16-colour palette, with a maximum resolution of 160×100. It was the lowest GRAPHICAL mode, but if we go into text modes, the bare minimum here was 40×25 with 8×8 px fonts, resulting in effective 320×200. Still, we saw something LOWER than 160×100 in 2021!

The video below is from RandomGaminginHD, who picked up two older graphics cards for this project. One of them is AMD Radeon HD6450 from roughly 2011, and the other one comes from Nvidia: its GeForce GT 710, originating from 2014. He tested some modern games on these outdated graphics cards… on 128×72. Yes, 128, 72. Even an ATM can do more than that (especially if it’s showing a BSOD…), and the last time we might have seen something similar, it had to be on mobile phones.

But let’s see how the games ran. Fortnite had a solid performance on both GPUs: Epic Games’ battle royale had an average of 50+ FPS, so it’s playable (although the visuals are… quite washed for obvious reasons). Grand Theft Auto V is also playable, as it averages 25-35 FPS on 128×72. However, Days Gone and Cyberpunk 2077 are nearly unplayable. If you get 10-20 FPS at most, then you will not get a stable and solid experience.

Of course, it requires some modifications to the games’ configuration files, as there are no displays with such a low resolution, and the titles themselves aren’t meant to be played on 128×72. Nowadays, even laptops see 768p as the minimum, 1080p seems to be common, and 4K is the trend.

Source: PCGamer