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I think there may be a counterintuitive situation where incremental improvement in hardware is worse than no improvement. Consider how much extra performance g

I think there may be a counterintuitive situation where incremental improvement in hardware is worse than no improvement. Consider how much extra performance game developers are able to wring out of a console after a few years' experience. If the hardware is absolutely stable, and there's no expectation that it can get faster, then people do make a big effort on software.

userbinator 11y ago
The biggest example of this is the demoscene, where some absolutely astounding things have been done with old hardware; e.g. a Commodore 64, 1MHz 8-bit CPU with 64KB of RAM.
nulltype 11y ago
In relation to this, user interfaces seem to be designed to have some response time less than some value. For games maybe it's 100ms, for the game console's dashboard, maybe 500ms, for an ATM, it's like 4000ms. I suspect the target response time is what determines how slow things are, not the speed of the hardware. As people have pointed out, hardware has gotten faster and many user interfaces have gotten slower, so it seems more likely that: the target response times have been rising (people tolerate higher response times in exchange for more features or whatever), or people with older and slower computers observe much higher response times than the original target (iphone 3gs vs iphone 5 for a given app, for instance). Stable hardware solves the second issue at least, but not sure about the first one. I think over time people will notice that everything else responds instantly to touch, and computers should too, so they will start rejecting apps that have a high target response time. As an example of that, I chose my last monitor by looking at http://www.displaylag.com/ http://www.displaylag.com/ to get the minimum latency there. If other people start caring more about the latency of the things they use, hardware and software developers will prioritize that.

userbinator 11y ago

The biggest example of this is the demoscene, where some absolutely astounding things have been done with old hardware; e.g. a Commodore 64, 1MHz 8-bit CPU with 64KB of RAM.

nulltype 11y ago

In relation to this, user interfaces seem to be designed to have some response time less than some value. For games maybe it's 100ms, for the game console's dashboard, maybe 500ms, for an ATM, it's like 4000ms. I suspect the target response time is what determines how slow things are, not the speed of the hardware. As people have pointed out, hardware has gotten faster and many user interfaces have gotten slower, so it seems more likely that: the target response times have been rising (people tolerate higher response times in exchange for more features or whatever), or people with older and slower computers observe much higher response times than the original target (iphone 3gs vs iphone 5 for a given app, for instance). Stable hardware solves the second issue at least, but not sure about the first one. I think over time people will notice that everything else responds instantly to touch, and computers should too, so they will start rejecting apps that have a high target response time. As an example of that, I chose my last monitor by looking at http://www.displaylag.com/ http://www.displaylag.com/ to get the minimum latency there. If other people start caring more about the latency of the things they use, hardware and software developers will prioritize that.