5 ms·

I dunno, it's very different than things were. I built my current desktop in 2011, and aside from an ssd and upgrading from a 560 to a 970 gtaphics card, haven'

• runeks 9y ago
  > Ten years ago, using a six year old machine meant you wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of running new software [...] Do you have some evidence for this claim? I'm not saying I disagree -- indeed, I suspect it might be true -- but I'd appreciate some evidence to back it up.
  • megaman22 9y ago
    Two that come to mind are Windows Vista upgrades, where many XP-capable machines were just not powerful enough to handle it. The other would be video games, which were constantly pushing the envelope. Consoles may have a lot to do with the stagnation in the latter case, however.
    • Brockenstein 9y ago
      Right. I bought a Pentium 3 800/GeForce 2 GTS in the summer of 2000. And by 2003 Homeworld 2 and Knights of the Old Republic had a Pentium 3 833mhz and a Pentium 3 1ghz respectively.
  • ptero 9y ago
    I do not have statistically significant evidence, but as another data point I have the same experience: both my home and work machines are 7-8 years old and work just fine (30" monitors, decent performance with numpy, MATLAB, compiling, perfectly fine graphics, etc.). But around 2000 I remember always carefully looking at the system requirements section of games to check which of those would work on my 2-3 year old computer and for which my machine is too old -- and find a significant rejection rate (25-50%).
  • electrichead 9y ago
    I don't know if that needs any evidence of the person was simply around back then. Basically this is saying that 2001 hardware wouldn't be able to run the new software in 2007, which at least to my recollection, is absolutely true. Not only is there 32bit vs 64bit, we also started to see more cores rather than the standard single core in 2001
    • ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
      I agree with you that this claim doesn't need evidence, but for anyone interested. Starcraft 2 came out in 2007. These are the original system requirements. https://www.lifewire.com/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty-requirements-813007 https://www.lifewire.com/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty-requi... I remember receiving the game as a gift and having to tell my grandma that my single core PC wouldn't be able to play it. I think my PC was only 3 years old at the time, not even 6.
      • Brockenstein 9y ago
        I think you're miss-remembering. Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty was released in 2010. I played it on release on my Core 2 Quad/GeForce 8800 GTS machine that I built in 2009. Blizzard announced they were making SC2 in 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_II:_Wings_of_Liberty#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_II:_Wings_of_Liberty... there wasn't even a closed beta until early 2010. Regardless, the minimum requirements you posted are single core CPU's.
    • deathanatos 9y ago
      It's a bit further apart than the mentioned dates, but I bought two machines: * 1998: 32-bit, 500 MHz, single core, 128MiB of RAM IIRC (we later upgraded it to ~500 MiB). 7 GB of disk. * 2007: 64-bit, ~2.5 MHz, dual core, 4, later 8 GiB of RAM. Hundreds of GB of disk. There's essentially an order of magnitude improvement…
  • rangibaby 9y ago
    Vista / 7 needed 1GB of RAM to run correctly. The systems from 2000 that I was familiar with had 512MB of less.
    • Brockenstein 9y ago
      In 2000 128/256 would have been common on new midrange systems. 512MB would have been high end or had RAM added after the fact as an upgrade.
  • wil421 9y ago
    Anyone using a computer back then ran into the same problems. The upgrade from Pentium to Core2Duo to the iX series was very noticeable. Not to mention the 32 bit to 64 bit transition that allowed us to use more RAM in Windows. IMHO, the upgrade from HDD to SSD was the most noticeable speed jump.
  • Brockenstein 9y ago
    Ten years ago, in 2007, using a machine from 2001. Probably a second generation Pentium 4 (https://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm#2001 https://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm#2001) or Athlon XP, with less than a gig of RAM or if you had upgraded it by 2007, probably 2 gigs or less. A Yeah, that would be pretty crummy in 2007 even if you'd bought a high end system in 2001. If it was entry level, forget it. I mean you'd still be able to compute things in 2007, but the overall experience would be sub-par. And a lot of things would run technically, but it would be painful enough you wouldn't even want to bother. My take on it is that multi-core CPU's caused the amount of computing power available on even budget systems to grow exponentially faster than software demands for that power. Not only is it more cores, but the power of a single core has also increased steadily. And the first Core Duo's were easily faster per core than the previous fastest single core Pentiums on top of having two cores. More power, better multi-tasking, it's a no brainer. The amount of computing power has increased much faster while software demands just haven't kept pace, and most software just doesn't require 3.5ghz and four cores for an optimal experience. The result is five, six, seven year old PC's are still perfectly serviceable. The same just generally wasn't true in the era of single core PC's.
  • pjc50 9y ago
    Recently I fished out my Toshiba Libretto 30, which I bought in 1998. It had just about enough processing power to play MP3s using the Fraunhofer codec, but not run WinAmp. Over the next couple of years the use of MP3 exploded: Napster, the iPod, iTunes. The boundary for "can this system decode mp3 in real time" was somewhere around the late 90s. Now of course it's not an issue on any device.
  • gilbetron 9y ago
    Like others have said, it is something that was extremely apparent to anyone around 10+ years ago that made use of computers. Back then, a computer was simply 2x as fast every 18 months. If you had a game that ran at 30fps, and you bought a new computer 18 months later, it would run at 60fps. Likewise, a new game would run at half speed on a computer that was 18 months old. While there are limits, the scaling largely held up over time. A game that ran at 15 fps (60 fps wasn't really a thing back then, usually you hit 15-30 fps) would be 32x faster 7.5 years later. Ditto with most software. The vast majority of speedup, from a processing standpoint, these days is all from increased parallelism (via more cores, or more SIMD-like instructions in the core), and because of Amdahl's "law", it can be very difficult to see benefits from increased parallelism. We're still seeing Moore's law for drive space, RAM, and somewhat bus speeds, and that's also where you get a lot more speedup.
    • wott 9y ago
      Agreeing with the rest but not the end. > We're still seeing Moore's law for drive space, Not really. 2Tb became a standard a long time ago, and it didn't change afterwards. Speed did not improve much either, especially latency (it cannot really improve), except by switching to SSDs, but then you lose capacity, so it is not a continuous improvement. > RAM, and somewhat bus speeds, and that's also where you get a lot more speedup. SDRAM is slow as molasses, as far as latency is concerned (the "Random Access" in R.A.M.). The improvements have been incredibly small in this domain. DDR4 access times are slower than SRAM access time from perhaps 20 years ago. It has however much larger capacity and larger throughput, indeed. > and somewhat bus speeds, and that's also where you get a lot more speedup. Same problem with buses, their frequency raised a lot, but that happened with switching from parallel to serial buses, leading to a lot of latency (and overload), not only on the bus itself because of the protocol, but also before and after because you need to serialise and then deserialise the data for you need it in a parallel form anyway. For example, the first SATA, despite its impressive frequency of 1.5 GHz, did not do better than the good old IDE/PATA with the latest UDMA. Same for PCI Express, it showed 2.5 GHz frequency, but its performance was not better than AGP or top PCI with their < 100 Mhz frequencies. Then to improve the throughput you had to add multiple lines of serial buses, which again add some need for synchronisation and thus extra latency.
• hyperpallium 9y ago
  But can you play PUBG at max settings? It's not just snark: PUBG is a new kind of game, with a level of realism, open-worldness and massive player numbers that hasn't been a hit before. Though it's said to be "not optimized", I think many of its performance issues won't be easily optimized away, because they are intrinsic to this new type of game. (Fortnite runs smoother, but has far less realism, amd its netcode has comparable latency),
  • megaman22 9y ago
    That genre's not my particular cup of tea, so I don't have any idea, but I'm running Warhammer Total War 2 maxed out.
  • VHRanger 9y ago
    The Battlefield series are heavily optimized and have much much better graphics than PUBG. They are in the same domain space (huge maps, 50+ players concurrently, etc.) Battlefield does use hardware very much, but that PUBG is not well optimized is fact.
    • hyperpallium 9y ago
      Agree that battlefield games look amazing and play smooth. And I'll allow 50 as close enough to 100. But the maps are not only smaller (largest I found was 1.5x1.5km), but very different in nature: they are designed for traditional fps gameplay, and incorporate techniques to enable fast rendering (e.g. limited visibility so submaps can be streamed in as you move between regions; mountain ranges seem impassable, again forming a gameplay element and aiding rendering). The PUBG map is less "designed", and more like a real place. All areas are accessible, and although terrain undulations do eventually close-off areas, they are far larger areas, and they don't seem designed for rendering but for realism and a different kind of gameplay. Finally, a single figure to dramatize the map contrast: Battlefield 1 shipped with 9 maps. PUBG shipped with 1.
  • lousken 9y ago
    massive player numbers? what about wow? and not the currect wow which has zones but old one from vanilla to wotlk I think there were a lot more players than 100
• debbiedowner 9y ago
  Sounds like anecdotal evidence that Moore's law has ended: If Moore's law was still in play then your 2011 computer would struggle to run 2017 software which is geared towards 2017 computers. But if Moore's law had ended then 2017 computers wouldn't be much faster than 2011 computers, so 2017 software would work fine on 2011 computers
  • Brockenstein 9y ago
    Moore's law isn't based on a machine ability to run software though. One could argue Moore's law isn't relevant anymore but that's different from whether it's dead or not. Either because adoption of new hardware has slowed down, or because we hit a tipping point where CPU power available is much greater than most software's need to utilize it means that performance gains exist. Modern hardware is faster than 2011 or 2013 hardware but the pressure to upgrade because things run crummy on old hardware just isn't there like it used to be.
• ajross 9y ago
  > I built my current desktop in 2011 Which makes it a 32nm Sandy Bridge, likely a i7 2600K, which were really popular. I had one too. That's a 3.4GHz part with a single-core turbo to 3.8GHz, and an IPC maybe 5-10% slower than Kaby/Coffee Lake (which are at 14nm). So that puts it about the same performance level as the lowest end (i3 8100) offering on the current process, and at about 60-70% higher power. So it's not that things have stopped. It's just much slower progress than you're used to. The desktop world is power-agnostic, so you're missing most of the innovation. Comparing a Sandy Bridge laptop to modern equivalents is a much more striking contrast: my current laptop (with a high performance CPU) will literally do a full day of work on a single battery, where nothing in 2011 was available to do that.