7 ms·
"I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?" - John Carmack
by 83457 9y ago
"I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?" - John Carmack
- baq 9y agopeople working on compositors should have that printed out and hung above their coffee machines.
- pjc50 9y agoSolution: send the pixel to the screen over IP! (joking, but with a tiny serious element)
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agothis reminds me of the argument that instead of going to USB C 3.1 as the grand unifying connector for all peripherals (including video), we should have instead migrated to Ethernet cables for everything.
- dilap 9y agoin all seriousness, why not?
- 542458 9y agoThe obvious ones: Ethernet cables are big (imagine one on a phone), and aren't designed to be plugged and unplugged the massive number of times that USB cables are (spring contacts wear out, little clips break).
- jririr828283 9y agoUSB cables have little to do with the question of sending pixels via IP Outside HDMI and some DisplayPort cables, all display connectors click or screw in And we’re talking about desktop OS and displays
- digi_owl 9y agoI'm not even sure about sending it as IP, rather as raw Ethernet frames (or simply just using the cables).
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agowell maybe the actual plug could be modified into a small form, while still being pin-compatible with cat 5/5e/6.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lmm 9y agoThe little plastic bits always snap off. Ethernet is great for semipermanent wires but not very good for peripherals like portable hard drives that are constantly disconnected and reconnected.
- jririr828283 9y agoWhat’s that to do with displays which aren’t unplugged frequently?
- deathanatos 9y agoI plug/unplug from my display several times daily, since the MBP connected to it travels with me. Granted, the end of the cable in the monitor typically doesn't move¹ ¹well, one of them. The crap LG monitors we have constantly forget about the peripherals that are attached, and one easy way to fix this is to detach/reattach the peripheral. I suspect that the company is never going to RMA these devices, sadly.
- lmm 9y agoUSB-C is used for all sorts of devices many of which are unplugged frequently.
- jdietrich 9y agoThat problem is largely solved if you use 8P8C connectors with a rubber boot protecting the latching tab. https://info.pcboard.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RJ45-Connector-Wiredx400.png https://info.pcboard.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RJ45-Conn...
- cpburns2009 9y agoEven with the protective guard the little plastic tabs inevitably break on me. I can't even say those have fared any better than the unprotected versions.
- Groxx 9y ago
- solotronics 9y agoethernet over multimode fiber, I want to be able to have accessories hundreds of meters away from my computer
- OnACoffeeBreak 9y agoJust make sure those cables are never bent beyond the minimum bend radius.
- willglynn 9y agoCareful, multi-mode fiber is near its scaling limits. 10GBASE-SR and 25GBASE-SR exist, but that's about it. (By contrast, 40GBASE-LR and 100GBASE-LR work over single-mode fiber, and DWDM + coherent optics can push the medium much further.) Wouldn't want to be stuck at 25 gbps forever ;-)
- makapuf 9y agoYeah, some of us can type pretty fast. And for mice, some of us take clicker games seriously.
- frik 9y agoActually not a bad idea. Ethernet speed is one gigabit per second. And there are high throughput devices like LIDARs (eg Velodyne LiDAR known from Google/Waymo self-driving cars) that are connected via Ethernet rather than USB. Having 1 GBit Ethernet LAN network since 2004, I would prefer the possibility to upgrade to 10Gbit home Ethernet in near future.
- astrodust 9y agoIt's a terrible idea. USB-3 is faster than 1Gbit/s. and there's no way you can drive a 5K monitor with any current or near future Ethernet standard, the bandwidth demands are too punishing. Ethernet isn't optimized around short-haul signals, like computer to screen over a few metres at most, it's for 100m+ runs in datacentres. The signals have to be a lot more durable.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago> "USB-3 is faster than 1Gbit/s" But Cat 6 Ethernet is 10 Gbit/s.
- lightedman 9y agoYou can do more than that if the run is rather short. Cat6 is used on the 20Gbit cross-links on many stackable rack-mounted switches.
- astrodust 9y agoStill not as fast as USB-3+Thunderbolt which is already 40Gbit/s and intended to be pushed to at least 80Gbit/s to support 8K screens.
- wereHamster 9y ago> there's no way you can drive a 5K monitor with any current or near future Ethernet standard, the bandwidth demands are too punishing. Really? You need more than 100gbit for 5k monitor? Because there is an 40/100gbit ethernet phy standard right now (has been for a while, since 2011). And work is being done on up to 200gbit (due to be ratified in late 2018).
- CodesInChaos 9y agoCurrently ethernet doesn't look cheap enough for video to me. Even a simple 1920x1080 60Hz monitor needs 3 Gb/s, a 2560*1440 144Hz monitor 13 Gb/s, a 4k 60Hz 12 Gb/s. DisplayPort 1.2 offers 17 Gb/s and DisplayPort 1.3 offers 26 Gb/s.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago40 Gbps and 100 Gbps Ethernet standard was defined in 2010 [1]. Google "buy 100 Gbps Ethernet" and you will find it is real, although currently is geared primarily for datacenters. [1] wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Gigabit_Ethernet
- rasz 9y agoSome people tried, most went out of business. Either chapter 11 or bought for assets and IP. OnLive was the biggest one.
- klmr 9y agoI had a hard time believing that quote at the time. John ended up answering the question I asked about it on SuperUser [1] with details about his setup. His writeup is impressive: he actually set up a high-speed camera to record the actual latency. [1] https://superuser.com/q/419070/2269 https://superuser.com/q/419070/2269
- sspiff 9y agoI used to work for Philips' TV branch, they used a similar setup. Instead of a camera they mounted a light sensor to the display and measured end-to-end delay for various color transitions (white-to-black, black-to-white, ...). All other manufacturers and many serious reviewers perform similar tests. Of course, these tests are always performed with all built-in image processing disabled, those can easily add 2 frames of delay on modern televisions. MPEG deblocking and noise removal are performed by most TV brands to improve image quality at a cost of latency.
- Jasper_ 9y agoRight, the issue is that 60Hz is ridiculously slow. Ethernet hardware is multiple orders of magnitude faster. It's just because of broadcast TV and CRT legacy. G-Sync / FreeSync allow up to 240Hz, which is ~4ms latency.
- thomasahle 9y ago60Hz is 16.7ms between each picture. However, that only gives you a lower bound on the latency. The actual time from GPU sending picture, to picture being on screen, can be a lot more. See the John Carmack answer above.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoNo, the issue was that he was using a display with a crazy amount of buffering because they were doing so much filtering and doing it poorly.
- Retric 9y agoIt's not just monitors even keyboards can have 40+ms worth of delay and it all adds up.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoI don't think that was what he was referring to
- Retric 9y ago"I video record showing both the game controller and the screen with a 240 fps camera" https://superuser.com/q/419070/2269 https://superuser.com/q/419070/2269 So, it's total response times from key press on a game controller to screen that is important not individual components. Sure, 0.04 seconds on it's own is not a big deal, but when 5 or six things take 0.04 seconds you hit noticeable delays.
- Sephr 9y ago