I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it. I’ve always been drawn to quake and cs for that reason: damn smooth. And no, it doesn’t just need to be FPS games either. I cant play beat saber with a modicum of lag or i suck massively, but others can play just fine and not even notice the lag.
Its odd. I feel like a complainer but maybe I just notice it more easily than others?
If you’re measuring display lag the same way we measure it with modern LCDs, then yes, CRTs do have lag.
Unless it’s an HD one, there’s no input buffer so it’s impossible for a CRT to have more than a frame of input lag. And the console needs a frame to notice your input anyway.
You measure lag by taking the capture of a frame an input happens when it is halfway down the screen. Therefore, CRTs have input lag of half their refresh rate. For NTSC, that’s about 8ms. For PAL, 10ms.
Incidentally, a modern gaming LCD has a 2ms average pixel response time. Which is about the same as the difference between NTSC and PAL.