7 ms·

Also anecdotally, I'd say the only things that would make a clearly noticeable performance difference to a layperson or casual computer user from the last few y

by parsimo2010 6y ago

Also anecdotally, I'd say the only things that would make a clearly noticeable performance difference to a layperson or casual computer user from the last few years would be: 1. If they previously had less than 4GB of memory and were often swapping 2. If they previously had a spinning HDD and moved to an SSD 3. If they previously had a really low end CPU like something outside the Core range, and moved to an i5 or better Beyond that, all the other stuff is either a marginal performance gain or a convenience feature. The only other "must have" thing from the last few years that I wouldn't want to lose is a high res monitor, but that falls into the convenience category for me and not performance. Power users like your family member got quantifiable benefit from performance upgrades over the years, but if they were already running decent hardware like a Macbook Pro, they didn't get any life altering upgrades. Taking 15 seconds to compile vs 30 is definitely faster, but you still have to sit and wait each time you push the button, so any habits that you learned from the 30 second pause will probably continue.

Taek 6y ago
In my opinion the jump from 1080p to 4K is as significant as the jump from hdd to ssd. That's a lot of screen real estate and especially when programming I put it to use.
- mrob 6y ago
  I disagree. The bottleneck is usually your eyes, not the monitor. On 1080p you can use small bitmap fonts that are legible even at low resolutions. 4K mostly gives you more flexible typography aesthetics, which doesn't improve programming productivity.
  - justaguy88 6y ago
    1080p outright looks blurry after using 4k, so its pretty hard to even contemplate going back
    - mrob 6y ago
      The whole point of bitmap fonts is that they're designed to be used without anti-aliasing. There's no blur. Examples: https://github.com/Tecate/bitmap-fonts https://github.com/Tecate/bitmap-fonts If you're on 4K you can simulate how they look on 1080p with 2x integer nearest neighbor scaling.
      - solarkraft 6y ago
        Too bad I can't bitmap-font UI elements. Being able to scale those freely (my DE allows it by a float value that is currently around 1,65) without too noticeable blur is my most important reason for a high resolution screen. The by current standards normal sharpness is nice too (1080 screens aren't really blurry, they're pixely).
    - jopsen 6y ago
      But getting vscode or chrome to render fast at 4k is nontrivial. I basically went back to 1080p because of this.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    2k equivalent on a 4k screen feels very good on my eyes. Reducing fatigue is productivity.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > The bottleneck is usually your eyes Eye resolution is ridiculously high. There's a reason companies started marketing 'retina' displays. Small fonts will not always fall into discrete pixels which is especially true if the resolution is not very high. Which requires you to do antialiasing or mangle the characters. Higher resolution displays allows you to render them more faithfully.
- baq 6y ago
  1440p 27” is the sweet spot for me: no scaling needed while not having to have your face inside your display and neck doesn’t hurt from constant twisting.
mrob 6y ago
4. If they previously had a 60Hz monitor, and upgraded to 120Hz or better. This improves both motion quality and latency. When poorly designed software makes you wait multiple frames, halving (or better) the frame time makes a noticeable difference.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  I find this one hard to swallow. On 60Hz software is already the bottleneck even on high end hardware. If anything, it’ll drive a perfectionist mad because crappy software that the high end hardware allowed to operate just over that threshold (say 64Hz) would suddenly be exposed. I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and experience that somewhat consistently rather than have such disparate performances. It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX.
  - ehvatum 6y ago
    120Hz is incredible for gaming. Unity and Unreal Engine dynamically scale tessellation and many other things to accommodate hardware performance, so as to maintain FPS on high-refresh screens. The polygon counts, texture detail, AI complexity of modern games is bonkers, but multiple moon landings of engineering time has gone into keeping solid 100Hz+ frame rates. However, you are definitely correct when it comes to GUI productivity applications. Drawing text in boxes is apparently much harder than rendering an immersive world in real time. The implications are too disturbing to consider, so I do not.
    - mrob 6y ago
      Some of it is deliberate: https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543 https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543 It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.
dougmwne 6y ago
Yes, he said the only thing he really noticed is that his build time dropped by a double digit percent but not a triple digit percent. He'd bought top of the line specs each time and had maxed out the ram and processor bin.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I wonder what a triple digit percent drop would feel like...
  - parsimo2010 6y ago
    I think it feels like traveling back in time :)
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      Does this new Intel chip have that?! Wow! ;-)
  - hyko 6y ago
    Time loop logic? I guess that would just about make it into the triple digits :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle#Time-loop_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princ...
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
And now there's a new category. 4. If they previously had an early generation of Core CPU like a Sandy Bridge that suffered great performance hit due to vulnerability, and then moved to an Ice Lake, or better, an AMD...
- fomine3 6y ago
  This is big factor for performance degradation, especially prior Ivy Bridge era.
bscphil 6y ago
> If they previously had less than 4GB of memory and were often swapping These days, it's more like if they previously had less than 12 GB of memory and were often swapping. Having a few dozen tabs open isn't that uncommon and interactive websites (Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs) can use an enormous amount of RAM.
- stan_rogers 6y ago
  Having a few dozen tabs open is actually incredibly weird outside of this little world.
  - Phrenzy 6y ago
    I have met a number of people who use tabs in lieu of bookmarks.
foxdev 6y ago
I just switched from a laptop with spinning rust and an Intel Celeron N2830 to a laptop with an SSD and a Ryzen 5 4500U. Each of the six cores is several times more powerful than the old CPU. Now I get why so many developers build sites that were unusable on the old one. Even a JavaScript-heavy site is as performant as a static site now. They don't even realize what they're doing to people stuck on old low-end computers. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-N2830-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-4500U/2213vs3702 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-N2830-vs-...
- josephg 6y ago
  A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work, and couldn't program over a long weekend. I had a first generation raspberry pi kicking around so I pulled that out, hooked it up to my monitor, installed nodejs and git and got to work from there. It took 700ms or so for my server process to even start on a r.pi - I'd noticed a brief delay on my laptop, but it was so awful on the pi that I ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing. Anyway, come Monday I pulled the changes onto my fancy laptop and they made a noticable difference in subtle responsiveness. Everything just felt faster. I probably wouldn't have even noticed if I didn't spend that time programming on the pi. Facebook has "slow internet thursdays" or something, where once a week developers can opt in to experience their internal facebook dev environments in the same way it feels for people on slow connections in poorer countries. I think that sort of thing would be good for all of us. Programming in constrained environments makes our software work better everywhere.
  - greggman3 6y ago
    In Chrome (and I'm guessing other browsers) you can go into the network tab and slow down networking. I don't think there is a similar option for CPU perf. There are several race conditions in many webpages related to waiting for video or images to load. Tangentially my late 2018 i5 MBA feels sluggish compared to my 2014 MBP. Simple things like switching windows are noticeably slower and janky. Unfortunately my 2014 MBP has an no longer supported NVidia GPU by Chrome/Firefox/Photoshop so I may have to upgrade but I know it will basically feel no different than what I have except I'll have the touch bar which I'm not really interested in.

Taek 6y ago

In my opinion the jump from 1080p to 4K is as significant as the jump from hdd to ssd. That's a lot of screen real estate and especially when programming I put it to use.

mrob 6y ago
I disagree. The bottleneck is usually your eyes, not the monitor. On 1080p you can use small bitmap fonts that are legible even at low resolutions. 4K mostly gives you more flexible typography aesthetics, which doesn't improve programming productivity.
- justaguy88 6y ago
  1080p outright looks blurry after using 4k, so its pretty hard to even contemplate going back
  - mrob 6y ago
    The whole point of bitmap fonts is that they're designed to be used without anti-aliasing. There's no blur. Examples: https://github.com/Tecate/bitmap-fonts https://github.com/Tecate/bitmap-fonts If you're on 4K you can simulate how they look on 1080p with 2x integer nearest neighbor scaling.
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      Too bad I can't bitmap-font UI elements. Being able to scale those freely (my DE allows it by a float value that is currently around 1,65) without too noticeable blur is my most important reason for a high resolution screen. The by current standards normal sharpness is nice too (1080 screens aren't really blurry, they're pixely).
  - jopsen 6y ago
    But getting vscode or chrome to render fast at 4k is nontrivial. I basically went back to 1080p because of this.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  2k equivalent on a 4k screen feels very good on my eyes. Reducing fatigue is productivity.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > The bottleneck is usually your eyes Eye resolution is ridiculously high. There's a reason companies started marketing 'retina' displays. Small fonts will not always fall into discrete pixels which is especially true if the resolution is not very high. Which requires you to do antialiasing or mangle the characters. Higher resolution displays allows you to render them more faithfully.
baq 6y ago
1440p 27” is the sweet spot for me: no scaling needed while not having to have your face inside your display and neck doesn’t hurt from constant twisting.

mrob 6y ago

4. If they previously had a 60Hz monitor, and upgraded to 120Hz or better. This improves both motion quality and latency. When poorly designed software makes you wait multiple frames, halving (or better) the frame time makes a noticeable difference.

ComputerGuru 6y ago
I find this one hard to swallow. On 60Hz software is already the bottleneck even on high end hardware. If anything, it’ll drive a perfectionist mad because crappy software that the high end hardware allowed to operate just over that threshold (say 64Hz) would suddenly be exposed. I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and experience that somewhat consistently rather than have such disparate performances. It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX.
- ehvatum 6y ago
  120Hz is incredible for gaming. Unity and Unreal Engine dynamically scale tessellation and many other things to accommodate hardware performance, so as to maintain FPS on high-refresh screens. The polygon counts, texture detail, AI complexity of modern games is bonkers, but multiple moon landings of engineering time has gone into keeping solid 100Hz+ frame rates. However, you are definitely correct when it comes to GUI productivity applications. Drawing text in boxes is apparently much harder than rendering an immersive world in real time. The implications are too disturbing to consider, so I do not.
  - mrob 6y ago
    Some of it is deliberate: https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543 https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543 It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.

dougmwne 6y ago

Yes, he said the only thing he really noticed is that his build time dropped by a double digit percent but not a triple digit percent. He'd bought top of the line specs each time and had maxed out the ram and processor bin.

rbanffy 6y ago
I wonder what a triple digit percent drop would feel like...
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  I think it feels like traveling back in time :)
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Does this new Intel chip have that?! Wow! ;-)
- hyko 6y ago
  Time loop logic? I guess that would just about make it into the triple digits :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle#Time-loop_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princ...

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

And now there's a new category. 4. If they previously had an early generation of Core CPU like a Sandy Bridge that suffered great performance hit due to vulnerability, and then moved to an Ice Lake, or better, an AMD...

fomine3 6y ago
This is big factor for performance degradation, especially prior Ivy Bridge era.

bscphil 6y ago

> If they previously had less than 4GB of memory and were often swapping These days, it's more like if they previously had less than 12 GB of memory and were often swapping. Having a few dozen tabs open isn't that uncommon and interactive websites (Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs) can use an enormous amount of RAM.

stan_rogers 6y ago
Having a few dozen tabs open is actually incredibly weird outside of this little world.
- Phrenzy 6y ago
  I have met a number of people who use tabs in lieu of bookmarks.

foxdev 6y ago

I just switched from a laptop with spinning rust and an Intel Celeron N2830 to a laptop with an SSD and a Ryzen 5 4500U. Each of the six cores is several times more powerful than the old CPU. Now I get why so many developers build sites that were unusable on the old one. Even a JavaScript-heavy site is as performant as a static site now. They don't even realize what they're doing to people stuck on old low-end computers. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-N2830-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-4500U/2213vs3702 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-N2830-vs-...

josephg 6y ago
A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work, and couldn't program over a long weekend. I had a first generation raspberry pi kicking around so I pulled that out, hooked it up to my monitor, installed nodejs and git and got to work from there. It took 700ms or so for my server process to even start on a r.pi - I'd noticed a brief delay on my laptop, but it was so awful on the pi that I ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing. Anyway, come Monday I pulled the changes onto my fancy laptop and they made a noticable difference in subtle responsiveness. Everything just felt faster. I probably wouldn't have even noticed if I didn't spend that time programming on the pi. Facebook has "slow internet thursdays" or something, where once a week developers can opt in to experience their internal facebook dev environments in the same way it feels for people on slow connections in poorer countries. I think that sort of thing would be good for all of us. Programming in constrained environments makes our software work better everywhere.
- greggman3 6y ago
  In Chrome (and I'm guessing other browsers) you can go into the network tab and slow down networking. I don't think there is a similar option for CPU perf. There are several race conditions in many webpages related to waiting for video or images to load. Tangentially my late 2018 i5 MBA feels sluggish compared to my 2014 MBP. Simple things like switching windows are noticeably slower and janky. Unfortunately my 2014 MBP has an no longer supported NVidia GPU by Chrome/Firefox/Photoshop so I may have to upgrade but I know it will basically feel no different than what I have except I'll have the touch bar which I'm not really interested in.