4 ms·

The numbers don’t really add up. Computers are a hundred times (replace with actual value, but it should work even for a 10x increase) faster, yet the feature s

by nothis 7y ago

The numbers don’t really add up. Computers are a hundred times (replace with actual value, but it should work even for a 10x increase) faster, yet the feature set hasn’t increased by anywhere near that factor. Also “feature” is a big word, usually a single feature doesn’t even eat up that much performance. I think it’s rather — just as Moore’s Law — a psychological phenomenon rather than a mathematical one. There’s just so many seconds we’re willing to wait and at one point, we don’t even care. Also the Internet hardened us for long wait/download times.

codesushi42 7y ago
Exactly this. Anyone who was gaming and "websurfing" back in the 90s will recognize that load times today are no better than back then, and are often times much worse. And that view isn't a psychological rewrite of the past. I regularly game on systems from both the 90s and modern day, and the load times for modern games are usually much worse than the CD games of old. The funny thing is that people would complain like crazy about CD load times back then, even citing it as a reason why CDs could never become mainstream. And yet, here we are present day with obscenely shitty load times for most software. I think the one area that has improved dramatically has been video streaming though. Real Player and the like were terrible even for their time.
- grawprog 7y ago
  >that load times today are no better than back then, and are often times much worse. Uhhhh, well I don't tend to wait 3-5 minutes for a single .jpeg to load on a website any more. I can stream a hq video in real time over the internet, whereas downloading a single 30MB realmedia video so pixelated you could barely see what was on the screen would take an hour or more to download. A 3MB mp3 would take 5-10 minutes. There have been massive speed increases in web surfing for sure. I don't understand how anyone that used the web back then could think otherwise. As for software load speed, the amount of data being loaded off a CD for a 2d or older 3d game is magnitudes smaller than the data being loaded from modern games. How many gigabytes of high res textures did those old games used to load? How many uncompressed HQ sound effects and music tracks? I remember installing multi-CD games and waiting and waiting,.then swapping the disc, then waiting then waiting, then back to disc one, more waiting, now disc 3. I'm not saying those things are better, but there's no way in hell my old 486 could have loaded multiple gigabytes of data at the same speed my laptop or even my phone now does.
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    Uhhhh, well I don't tend to wait 3-5 minutes for a single .jpeg to load on a website any more. That was not true on 56k in the late 90s. On a baud modem in 93, sure, but I wasn't talking about that. As for software load speed, the amount of data being loaded off a CD for a 2d or older 3d game is magnitudes smaller than the data being loaded from modern games. Irrelevant. The amount of multimedia on a CD was vastly more than the main memory available at the time. Plus you didn't have multi cores, SSD storage (or any HD) etc. No one optimizes anymore, and it shows.
    - grawprog 7y ago
      Well I was talking about 97-99 as far as internet browsing went. I don't really remember the internet before that. I wasn't allowed fuck around too much when we had dialup it cost too much. Yes it really was that slow. That was when I first started downloading music and TV shows. I vividly remember the waiting. >Irrelevant. The amount of multimedia on a CD was vastly more than the main memory available at the time. I don't follow. It's not like all available memory is ever used to load things from storage. All I know is, I can copy an 8GB DVD on my current computer with 6GB of RAM faster than I could have copied a 756MB CD with around 500MB of RAM. I do agree nothing is optimized as well, but that's some hard nostalgia goggles talking there.
      - codesushi42 7y ago
        I mean the file size comparison doesn't really apply, because hardware back then had many limitations anyway. We should be seeing much better load times than we are given current hardware, not incrementally better or even worse. Which is the reality, since no one optimizes anymore.
- scarecrowbob 7y ago
  I dunno... I recall loading stuff off cassette tapes onto C64. But I was there in the 90s, too. Sure, the load times on an NES are better than, say Fallout 4, but I remember starting up Ultima 8 for the first time and that was some sincere amount of wait. I think that things are much better now, at least in the few games I've played in the last couple of years (Bioshock, Detroit: Become Human, Fallout 4, Red Dead II). The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies, I just wait for it to DL what it has to do. Granted that takes a while, but at least I don't have to hand feed it.
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies Ahhhh ok you got me there. Floppies were terrible, and playing games on a low end DOS machine was terribly slow. I have played modern games that were about as frustrating though, but only if they're completely broken. I was referring to game consoles though. Load times on Sega CD on 3DO were terrible for the time and turned off a lot of consumers back then (though not the only reason those platforms failed, they were just the slowest of the bunch). But the load times in modern games is typically far worse than those systems ever saw. I switch between modern and retro era systems frequently, and I find modern load times embarrassing given what people were up in arms about back then. Jonathon Blow tends to agree with me, FWIW. Check out some of his talks on the lack of optimization in modern software if you have the chance. Modern software should be a lot faster than it is given the hardware capabilities, according to him too.
    - just_myles 7y ago
      I remember when I tried to run Doom on my old 386 HP and man was it slow haha. I think nowadays, these online arena games take forever to load. Back in the 90s it was all about loading and performance. Quite the shift in gamer expectations.
      - scarecrowbob 7y ago
        I remember thinking I was a badass because I filled Wolf3d's resource meters all the way up. I think one of the first actually useful programs I've written in my life was a conditional in the autoexec.bat script that let me choose different memory configurations. What fun times :D

by nothis 7y ago

codesushi42 7y ago

Exactly this. Anyone who was gaming and "websurfing" back in the 90s will recognize that load times today are no better than back then, and are often times much worse. And that view isn't a psychological rewrite of the past. I regularly game on systems from both the 90s and modern day, and the load times for modern games are usually much worse than the CD games of old. The funny thing is that people would complain like crazy about CD load times back then, even citing it as a reason why CDs could never become mainstream. And yet, here we are present day with obscenely shitty load times for most software. I think the one area that has improved dramatically has been video streaming though. Real Player and the like were terrible even for their time.

grawprog 7y ago
>that load times today are no better than back then, and are often times much worse. Uhhhh, well I don't tend to wait 3-5 minutes for a single .jpeg to load on a website any more. I can stream a hq video in real time over the internet, whereas downloading a single 30MB realmedia video so pixelated you could barely see what was on the screen would take an hour or more to download. A 3MB mp3 would take 5-10 minutes. There have been massive speed increases in web surfing for sure. I don't understand how anyone that used the web back then could think otherwise. As for software load speed, the amount of data being loaded off a CD for a 2d or older 3d game is magnitudes smaller than the data being loaded from modern games. How many gigabytes of high res textures did those old games used to load? How many uncompressed HQ sound effects and music tracks? I remember installing multi-CD games and waiting and waiting,.then swapping the disc, then waiting then waiting, then back to disc one, more waiting, now disc 3. I'm not saying those things are better, but there's no way in hell my old 486 could have loaded multiple gigabytes of data at the same speed my laptop or even my phone now does.
- codesushi42 7y ago
  Uhhhh, well I don't tend to wait 3-5 minutes for a single .jpeg to load on a website any more. That was not true on 56k in the late 90s. On a baud modem in 93, sure, but I wasn't talking about that. As for software load speed, the amount of data being loaded off a CD for a 2d or older 3d game is magnitudes smaller than the data being loaded from modern games. Irrelevant. The amount of multimedia on a CD was vastly more than the main memory available at the time. Plus you didn't have multi cores, SSD storage (or any HD) etc. No one optimizes anymore, and it shows.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    Well I was talking about 97-99 as far as internet browsing went. I don't really remember the internet before that. I wasn't allowed fuck around too much when we had dialup it cost too much. Yes it really was that slow. That was when I first started downloading music and TV shows. I vividly remember the waiting. >Irrelevant. The amount of multimedia on a CD was vastly more than the main memory available at the time. I don't follow. It's not like all available memory is ever used to load things from storage. All I know is, I can copy an 8GB DVD on my current computer with 6GB of RAM faster than I could have copied a 756MB CD with around 500MB of RAM. I do agree nothing is optimized as well, but that's some hard nostalgia goggles talking there.
    - codesushi42 7y ago
      I mean the file size comparison doesn't really apply, because hardware back then had many limitations anyway. We should be seeing much better load times than we are given current hardware, not incrementally better or even worse. Which is the reality, since no one optimizes anymore.
scarecrowbob 7y ago
I dunno... I recall loading stuff off cassette tapes onto C64. But I was there in the 90s, too. Sure, the load times on an NES are better than, say Fallout 4, but I remember starting up Ultima 8 for the first time and that was some sincere amount of wait. I think that things are much better now, at least in the few games I've played in the last couple of years (Bioshock, Detroit: Become Human, Fallout 4, Red Dead II). The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies, I just wait for it to DL what it has to do. Granted that takes a while, but at least I don't have to hand feed it.
- codesushi42 7y ago
  The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies Ahhhh ok you got me there. Floppies were terrible, and playing games on a low end DOS machine was terribly slow. I have played modern games that were about as frustrating though, but only if they're completely broken. I was referring to game consoles though. Load times on Sega CD on 3DO were terrible for the time and turned off a lot of consumers back then (though not the only reason those platforms failed, they were just the slowest of the bunch). But the load times in modern games is typically far worse than those systems ever saw. I switch between modern and retro era systems frequently, and I find modern load times embarrassing given what people were up in arms about back then. Jonathon Blow tends to agree with me, FWIW. Check out some of his talks on the lack of optimization in modern software if you have the chance. Modern software should be a lot faster than it is given the hardware capabilities, according to him too.
  - just_myles 7y ago
    I remember when I tried to run Doom on my old 386 HP and man was it slow haha. I think nowadays, these online arena games take forever to load. Back in the 90s it was all about loading and performance. Quite the shift in gamer expectations.
    - scarecrowbob 7y ago
      I remember thinking I was a badass because I filled Wolf3d's resource meters all the way up. I think one of the first actually useful programs I've written in my life was a conditional in the autoexec.bat script that let me choose different memory configurations. What fun times :D