Your timeline is pretty far off, to my memory. We had VGA graphics games in the early 90s. My Sparcstation 20 came with a 1280x1024 CRT monitor. The 15" Sony CRT I bought shortly after, along with a Matrox Millenium PCI graphics card, was capable of the same. I ran a 21" Sony at 2048x1536 in 1999. It did not flicker.
If he's talking about games and therefore mass market Intel micros, he's roughly right. 1990ish just-plain-VGA gives you 640x480x4bit or 320x200x8bit. You'd generally use the latter for games.
