What does Horizon Zero Dawn look like in 128×72? There are pictures.

What are we really looking at here? A rock? An enemy? Is it even important compared to the glory of the race Horizon Zero Dawn at the breathtaking resolution of 128 pixels wide by 72 pixels high? Yes a YouTuber managed to play Horizon Zero Dawn at 72p, and it’s not a typo.

The YouTuber in question is Kryzzp, which also runs through zWORMz Gaming, and he ran the game at that absurd resolution to test the performance of an Nvidia GT 710, an ultra-budget video card that cost just $ 40 brand new in 2016. Incredibly, he manages to fend off one of the robotic enemies, although it’s impossible to say how much ammo he had left after that.

To put that 128 x 72 resolution into context, it’s actually less than a modern color graphing calculator like the TI-84 Plus CE, which has a 320 x 240 screen that has many more pixels. You might imagine the game looking like this on a Game Boy Advance, but you’d still miss the mark: this 2001 laptop had a screen resolution of 240×160. However, older TI-8E graphing calculators had a resolution of 96 x 64.

While watching someone struggle to play a game at a resolution that would have been considered bad 10 years ago can be funny, it’s also intriguing – what other games can you run like that? There is probably fun in posting ultra-low resolution screenshots on the internet and making one guess what game they are watching. “Is it Grand Theft Auto or Power? I really only see one car. ”

I think it’s safe to say that it almost makes a curl to be aesthetic again. It’s like watching a game from an alternate reality where Amiga style graphics have remained in vogue forever, even after the switch to 3D. It’s beautiful in its own way.

If you want to try and run it like this for yourself, you’ll need low-power hardware, as the resolutions available seem to depend on what graphics card you have. My ThinkPad’s integrated Intel HD 620 graphics are technically more powerful than the Nvidia GT 710, so the lowest resolution I was able to run the game at was 160×100 (after adjusting the game’s resolution to 50%). Not that I was able to actually run, as the mission asked – I couldn’t read the button prompt on the screen.