5 ms·
The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.
by trzy 2mo ago
The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.
- iAMkenough 2mo agoFor a weather app, you should be able to get by with a couple base vectors you modify based on conditions.
- mort96 2mo agoOn disk yeah, sure. But you're gonna render them into a pixel buffer which lives in memory.
- samrus 2mo agoHow did applications do it before? Like in the 90s or 00s
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- nicoburns 2mo agoThey had fewer graphics, and much lower resolution screens.
- Dylan16807 2mo agoWindows 98 SE kind of went overboard with the graphics (remember Active Desktop?), and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024. But if you run modern stuff at 1080p (60% more pixels) or 720p (fewer pixels), you're not going to see comparable memory use.
- mort96 2mo agoWindows 98 wasn't composited, which makes a huge difference. And to be clear, there's a ton of unnecessary bloat today as well. It's just that even a lean and mean highly hand optimized native app is gonna be way bigger today than it was then, due to compositing, higher resolution assets, higher resolution screens and different design sensibilities. But most apps aren't lean and mean highly hand optimized native apps so.
- Dylan16807 2mo agoCompositing means you can excuse an extra dozen megabytes per megapixel of window size. The window in the article is less than a megapixel. That factors in the relevant part of screen resolution too. High resolution assets should scale alongside window size too, adding a fraction of the above dozen megabytes. And I'm saying 98SE already had image-heavy design sensibilities all over. You don't have to highly hand optimize to run a weather UI in a lean way.
- vel0city 2mo ago> and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024 Maybe if you were really rich and only used high end desktops. A lot of the computers I used back then were still 800x600, fancier ones were 1024x768. If you happened to also have a 2D accelerator card you'd potentially have 1280x1024. And lots of apps purposefully ran at a much lower color depth, it was common for games to run at 8 or 16 bit color mode.
- Dylan16807 2mo agoI saw a lot of computers set to 800x600 but I don't recall any that couldn't be switched to at least 1024x768. Which is still quite close to 720p for making this comparison. And yeah lots of fullscreen-ish things ran in lower color, but this is about desktop mode and I never saw a desktop mode that struggled based on color depth.
- kasabali 2mo agoCheapest local brand 15" CRTs could do 1280x1024 in early 2000s. because you weren't limited by the panel unlike LCDs. You'd need better than perfect vision to be able to make use of it, though.
- vel0city 2mo agoIt's less of a question of if you could get a CRT that could do it versus having a PC with the video RAM and drawing performance to do it effectively at high color bit depth. Tons of extremely common desktops at the time shipped with only 2-4MB video memory with their integrated graphics chipsets. You're not doing 1280x1024 at 32-bit color with 2MB of RAM.
- koyote 2mo agoEarly 90s maybe. By the end of the 90s and definitely early 2000s CRT screens were 1024×768 for the cheap crap and 1600×1200 for the high-end (with 1280×1024 as a mid-range).
- vel0city 2mo ago
- mort96 2mo agoWAY lower resolution screens so pixel and frame buffers were a tiny fraction of the size, non-composited graphical environments which meant there was one fewer frame buffer per window, and a visual style which typically emphasized large pictures/animations less.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo agoDo all visual aspects of a weather app need to be loaded at once? Is the cost penalty loading a hundred kilobytes per image from disk really unacceptable?
- doikor 2mo agoEven if the app is no longer using that memory it is not released until Windows thinks another app needs it.
- vel0city 2mo agoAnd then people complain about how unresponsive applications are, all these little stutters as things pop in.
- mrheosuper 2mo agoOur storage can transfer Gigabytes of data, do hundred thousand operations every second. The hardware is more than capable. If your software stutter when streaming few hundred KBs of data, it's on you.
- vel0city 2mo agoBandwidth and latency are two different things. The latency of handling things in system memory is still pretty different than the latency of handling stuff on SSDs.
- mrheosuper 2mo agoStill, it should not be more than few miliseconds, it's solid state. Im pretty sure most of the latency come from the software.
- Micrococonut 2mo agoShould be able to get by with using system graphics
- anonymars 2mo agoWhy, though? You need some icons and some map imagery, not 4K texture maps