4 ms·
I think one of the major times to use Desktop applications is when performance is critical. Video games are the key example: all video games are competing agai
by dragontamer 4y ago
I think one of the major times to use Desktop applications is when performance is critical.
Video games are the key example: all video games are competing against other games for what comes down to more complicated physics calculations (often light-based physics: "more realistic" shadows from Raytracing, or "cooler" shaders like Dragonball FighterZ / Guilty Gear (very "unrealistic", but clearly requires modern GPU-shaders to calculate).
Though Google tried to get video games "into the cloud", it still required data-centers full of high-end GPUs... and even then had latency issues.
Other performance critical applications include Stockfish Chess, LeelaZero Go (and KataGo), Blender 3d modeling, etc. etc. Having the user "spend the money on more compute" is economically a more feasible move, than centralizing compute costs to a server somewhere (especially costly GPU-hosting).
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Good news! There's plenty of performance-critical applications waiting to be explored.
But if you just need to deploy a simple application with low compute costs, centralizing the compute into a single server (or even mild decentralization through the Javascript interpreter) is good enough.
- groby_b 4y agoHave you... read the article? Like, at all? They are specifically talking about the issue of data ownership, not performance. They are talking from a user perspective, not from a developer perspective. And they are specifically not talking about how centralizing is "good enough" - because it fails exactly at the data ownership point.
- dragontamer 4y agoI have read it, and stand by what I say. Desktop applications shine in this performance situation. Video games, 3d renderers, chess analysis, go analysis, deep learning, compiling, video editing. ----------- If we're talking about "Data moving with you wherever you go", that was a Floppy Disk back in the day. If you want bookmarks to be portable in some kind of modern day setting, you'd store it on your phone and connect that up with your Desktop-app, or maybe keep it on a USB drive in your pocket.
- groby_b 4y agoOnce more: There is a privacy concern. "Make thing go fast" wasn't on the list. Performance is not the concern. It's not "data moving with you", it's "data should not be available to third parties"
- gfxgirl 4y ago3d renders might win in the cloud because the default could be a render farm. they could also be running on the top GPUs where you might locally have some low-end notebook. I haven't used it but as one example there is Clara.io and even if Clara.io isn't perfect it at least shows a path