I’ve been thinking about this lately. I guess it just doesn’t make sense to me that 40 years ago we were barely able to move pixels across a screen and now there are games where even hundreds of people can play games like first person shooters on servers simultaneously where reactions down to the millisecond commonly decide the outcome of a game. How can we match the inputs of everyone and have them appear on someone else’s screen? Is it simply that information travels at the speed of light and we are really good at organizing it?
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The Intel 8086 CPU was released in 1976, and it had 29,000 transistors.
The Intel Core i9-12900K processor, released in 2021, has about 3 billion transistors. And it’s already getting outdated..
And this is without even talking about video cards, which didn’t exactly even exist in the 1980s.
So yeah, microchips have become astonishingly more powerful. They’ve been by far the fastest-improving technology in human history. And the devices that control the Internet – switches, routers, hubs – also use microchips, so they gained a lot from this. The infrastructure of the Internet, fiber optic cables crisscrossing the globe, has also been continually improving over the decades.
Last but not least, most networked games don’t show you *exactly* what the other players are doing at a given instant. They predict it based on the player’s trajectory, and make corrections after the fact if necessary.
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