> Carmack explains how if would be possible to have tear free, framerate level updates "if only" people would upgrade to 8MB of video ram and 100MB/sec busses.

> Carmack explains how if would be possible to have tear free, framerate level updates "if only" people would upgrade to 8MB of video ram and 100MB/sec busses. With 1280x1024x8@75Hz and a single blit per frame. For 32-bit colour like you have virtually everywhere these days, multiply that bandwidth by four; for a 2560x1600 screen like the one I’m writing this on, multiply further by three and a bit; (admittedly,) for 60Hz instead of 75Hz, multiply by 4/5. All in all, this laptop I’m sitting before needs a gigabyte per second to just barely sustain one blit per frame. And it needs a full framebuffer of video RAM (15M bytes) for the pretty security-message crossfade, probably at least a couple framebuffers per tab for the tiled renderer in the browser, something in that ballpark so that I can smoothly scroll through a PDF I’m reading and not wait for it to rasterize... If I open a Chinese webpage, how much video RAM for the subpixel-positioned glyph cache, I wonder? And remember, none of that OpenGL floating-point-colour nonsense, that would multiply both memory and bandwidth by three again. Carmack could have probably squeezed a smooth UI into a 8M main + 8M (16M?) video RAM, 100 MB/s machine at 800x600, if the UI you wanted was the one from 1995. And that would honestly be grand, I’d be happy to see that on a 2005-specced machine, even. But let’s not kid ourselves—we do in fact demand much more from our computers now than we did then.