The low latency claimed by LCD marketers concerns narrow grey-to-grey transitions. Black to white remains as slow as ever.
The other issue is all of the other causes of latency along pipeline. The NES emits an composite video signal directly from its video chip, the PPU. This composite signal travels along a coax cable into the back of the TV where it’s split by the analogue circuitry into signals driving the luminance and colour, synchronized to the horizontal and vertical retrace. The whole process happens in less time than it takes to convert that signal into digital before it could even be sent to an LCD.
That is, before our LCD display even receives a frame it’s already on the screen of the CRT. The NES is explicitly designed around the NTSC timing structure, with the rendering in the PPU happening “just in time” to be sent to the CRT. There is no place in the NES to buffer a frame.
> The whole process happens in less time than it takes to convert that signal into digital before it could even be sent to an LCD.
While that's true, doing the conversion doesn't need to add more than a microsecond of latency.
> That is, before our LCD display even receives a frame it’s already on the screen of the CRT. The NES is explicitly designed around the NTSC timing structure, with the rendering in the PPU happening “just in time” to be sent to the CRT. There is no place in the NES to buffer a frame.
An LCD doesn't have to buffer a frame either. I believe there are models that don't. It can display as it receives, limited by the crystal speed which is still an order of magnitude improvement.
The other issue is all of the other causes of latency along pipeline. The NES emits an composite video signal directly from its video chip, the PPU. This composite signal travels along a coax cable into the back of the TV where it’s split by the analogue circuitry into signals driving the luminance and colour, synchronized to the horizontal and vertical retrace. The whole process happens in less time than it takes to convert that signal into digital before it could even be sent to an LCD.
That is, before our LCD display even receives a frame it’s already on the screen of the CRT. The NES is explicitly designed around the NTSC timing structure, with the rendering in the PPU happening “just in time” to be sent to the CRT. There is no place in the NES to buffer a frame.