3 ms·

I'm not talking about games, I'm talking general computer use responsiveness. the difference in computing resources between a pentium II @ 266mhz and modern-day

by ido 6y ago

I'm not talking about games, I'm talking general computer use responsiveness. the difference in computing resources between a pentium II @ 266mhz and modern-day CPUs is much bigger than 16x and even back then win95 was a lot slower than it should have been (we were saying basically the same thing - "why is this 266mhz PII not feeling any faster than my old 8mhz amiga?"). Again the "poster boy" for responsive interaction is probably BeOS - the original BeBox used dual ppc 603 CPUs at 66mhz: if you consider IPC, Mhz & number of cores a modern CPU probably has 1000x the computation power at its disposal & RAM is also generally 1000x more plentiful (we have as many GBs as we used to have MBs back then). I'll bet with GPUs the difference is even bigger.

rbanffy 6y ago
Back then, to write a pixel you did, at most, 3 memory writes. Now you need to write those bits to a bitmap and pass it on to the GPU, which will combine it with all the rest of the stuff needed to make your screen happen and, hopefully, you'll see something in a couple screen refresh cycles.
lostmsu 6y ago
Single 4k screen @ 60Hz requires transfer rate of 3840x2160x3 bytes 60 times per second = ~1.5GB/s just to copy pixels without any logic applied. Typical RAM module (DDR-266) in late 90s could only provide ~2.1GB/s, leaving almost no room to perform any compute on a single 4k screen, and simply insufficient to run two of them. PC66 of early 90s could only do 0.5GB/s. DDR3, commonly used now in integrated GPUs does 13GB/s. What I am getting at, is that the task to just copy pixels to a screen became proportionally harder as RAM progressed forward (26x faster per module since 1990, 6.5x per module since 1999 vs 60x more work per screen since 1990 (256 colors), 10x per screen since 1999). And that is just screen rendering. Same happened to source code, documents, images, everything.

by ido 6y ago

rbanffy 6y ago

Back then, to write a pixel you did, at most, 3 memory writes. Now you need to write those bits to a bitmap and pass it on to the GPU, which will combine it with all the rest of the stuff needed to make your screen happen and, hopefully, you'll see something in a couple screen refresh cycles.

lostmsu 6y ago

Single 4k screen @ 60Hz requires transfer rate of 3840x2160x3 bytes 60 times per second = ~1.5GB/s just to copy pixels without any logic applied. Typical RAM module (DDR-266) in late 90s could only provide ~2.1GB/s, leaving almost no room to perform any compute on a single 4k screen, and simply insufficient to run two of them. PC66 of early 90s could only do 0.5GB/s. DDR3, commonly used now in integrated GPUs does 13GB/s. What I am getting at, is that the task to just copy pixels to a screen became proportionally harder as RAM progressed forward (26x faster per module since 1990, 6.5x per module since 1999 vs 60x more work per screen since 1990 (256 colors), 10x per screen since 1999). And that is just screen rendering. Same happened to source code, documents, images, everything.