14 ms·

Yeah.. late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. I learned through a relative fluke how much going a bit over the top on memory and faster drives re

Yeah.. late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. I learned through a relative fluke how much going a bit over the top on memory and faster drives really helped over even a faster CPU/GPU a lot of the time for general use. My current computer is literally the first I've built in decades that I didn't max out the RAM... I mean, I kind of did as 2x48gb was the most I could get in DDR5@6000 and only use 2 slots (or it would run much slower). 4th gen Core series was the longest I'd held onto a single PC (close to 5 years total for a 4790K). I did a mid-cycle gpu and nvme upgrade and that was it. I bumped to a 3950X/5950X and now 9950X since... AM3 is really the first socket in a long time I'd done an in-place upgrade for any CPU. My daughter's Ryzen 2400 to a 5000 series, and my own build from a 3600 -> 3950X -> 5950X... the 3600 was a placeholder as I couldn't get a 3950X for a few months. I couldn't even name half the CPUs I ran from 1998 to 2005 or so... it was such a blur of upgrades every 6-12 months... I'd upgrade my computer, my wife's, my son's... etc. Then, things just completely stagnated... I mean there's been progress, but it's over the course of years, not seeing 2-3x in under a year.

bombcar 7mo ago
I remember that it started to stall out on RAM before CPU (in that it became "reasonable" to have way more RAM than you really needed - Chrome didn't exist yet lol); that the very early move to multi-core was a bit of a downer (much couldn't use more than 2 or 3 cores so a "new CPU" with 4 instead of 2 cores but the same single-thread performance would be hardly noticeable). Then of course there was the huge "replace everything with SSDs ASAP" performance bump, but ever since the later Core and before the M1, everything felt incremental. Nothing like the "Wolfenstein 3D to Quake Glide in 5 years" era. Holy shit it was only 5 years - the M1 was released 6 years ago!
- anthk 7mo ago
  Froom Doom ~1993 to the Unreal engine ~1998, used even for Deus Ex, in just 5 years. For GenZers: a bigger jump than the one from the 3DS to the Switch. By comparison, from the first Core Duo computers to today... we should have been roaming around, at street, level, in fully 3D rendered cities in Street View long ago, at least with Half Life 2 quality graphics and some high res textures and light bolted on to fake out the most complex effects. And yet what we have it's the exact same rendering PC's and PowerPC macs did with virtual tour multimedia CD's in late 90's (and Encarta) but in a higher resolution. Literally. A 2D image rendered inside of an sphere. That's it, something right now you can do in software without too much effort. You can get some 3D image and a dedicated viewer for it such as Panini with no advanced 3D support at all and what you are literally doing it's the same as JS scripts and WebGL are trying to do with Street View still images but with a Core Duo CPU or a high end Pentium 4. Which is a technology closer to Myst in concept than the Unreal Engine. There's no actual progress as the one we lived through the 90's. Years passed as huge steps in the same way a kid aged 10 had near nothing to do in tastes with a 14yo one. Well, technology in our lives was the same. From walkmans to CD's and for crappy MSDOS computers in Mid Elementary to Windows 98 at nearly the high scrool.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    Part of it is that things are slowing down, so the "solution" selected is the same - Unreal engine released in 1998; people still using evolved Unreal engine today. I feel we haven't really had a different paradigm for decades, and I'm not sure AI even really is one.
    - tracker1 7mo ago
      Not sure that I completely agree here... I think part of the issue is that things have slowed down and even parallel GPUs are about as big as they can physically get. The top of the line is pretty much gate-kept and sitting in warehouses (already purchased for AI datacenters that are years away from being built, let alone where the electricity will come from). We're in a kind of weird limbo of overpriced scraps and wait and see, while the all of computer mfg feels like an AI shell game combined with a cartel of memory pirates.
- tracker1 7mo ago
  Maybe... it's hard for me to remember for sure... I know around 2010 or so, my laptops had 16gb ram (my daughter is still using my old MBP)... I know I was running 32gb on my desktop from the Core 2 days through half a decade on my i7-4790K... It was really the shift to Linux (even WSL before it) and a lot of service containers locally that bumped up my memory usage significantly. Even today, I'm running a Windows Server VM with 32gb of ram assigned to it. Aside: OMG, what a pain that the alt-tab hotkeys will not be captured INSIDE the RDP or VM management session app. Not sure if that's a wayland or cosmic thing, but it's annoying.

bombcar 7mo ago

I remember that it started to stall out on RAM before CPU (in that it became "reasonable" to have way more RAM than you really needed - Chrome didn't exist yet lol); that the very early move to multi-core was a bit of a downer (much couldn't use more than 2 or 3 cores so a "new CPU" with 4 instead of 2 cores but the same single-thread performance would be hardly noticeable). Then of course there was the huge "replace everything with SSDs ASAP" performance bump, but ever since the later Core and before the M1, everything felt incremental. Nothing like the "Wolfenstein 3D to Quake Glide in 5 years" era. Holy shit it was only 5 years - the M1 was released 6 years ago!

anthk 7mo ago
Froom Doom ~1993 to the Unreal engine ~1998, used even for Deus Ex, in just 5 years. For GenZers: a bigger jump than the one from the 3DS to the Switch. By comparison, from the first Core Duo computers to today... we should have been roaming around, at street, level, in fully 3D rendered cities in Street View long ago, at least with Half Life 2 quality graphics and some high res textures and light bolted on to fake out the most complex effects. And yet what we have it's the exact same rendering PC's and PowerPC macs did with virtual tour multimedia CD's in late 90's (and Encarta) but in a higher resolution. Literally. A 2D image rendered inside of an sphere. That's it, something right now you can do in software without too much effort. You can get some 3D image and a dedicated viewer for it such as Panini with no advanced 3D support at all and what you are literally doing it's the same as JS scripts and WebGL are trying to do with Street View still images but with a Core Duo CPU or a high end Pentium 4. Which is a technology closer to Myst in concept than the Unreal Engine. There's no actual progress as the one we lived through the 90's. Years passed as huge steps in the same way a kid aged 10 had near nothing to do in tastes with a 14yo one. Well, technology in our lives was the same. From walkmans to CD's and for crappy MSDOS computers in Mid Elementary to Windows 98 at nearly the high scrool.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Part of it is that things are slowing down, so the "solution" selected is the same - Unreal engine released in 1998; people still using evolved Unreal engine today. I feel we haven't really had a different paradigm for decades, and I'm not sure AI even really is one.
  - tracker1 7mo ago
    Not sure that I completely agree here... I think part of the issue is that things have slowed down and even parallel GPUs are about as big as they can physically get. The top of the line is pretty much gate-kept and sitting in warehouses (already purchased for AI datacenters that are years away from being built, let alone where the electricity will come from). We're in a kind of weird limbo of overpriced scraps and wait and see, while the all of computer mfg feels like an AI shell game combined with a cartel of memory pirates.
tracker1 7mo ago
Maybe... it's hard for me to remember for sure... I know around 2010 or so, my laptops had 16gb ram (my daughter is still using my old MBP)... I know I was running 32gb on my desktop from the Core 2 days through half a decade on my i7-4790K... It was really the shift to Linux (even WSL before it) and a lot of service containers locally that bumped up my memory usage significantly. Even today, I'm running a Windows Server VM with 32gb of ram assigned to it. Aside: OMG, what a pain that the alt-tab hotkeys will not be captured INSIDE the RDP or VM management session app. Not sure if that's a wayland or cosmic thing, but it's annoying.