When I grew up computers were slow and you had to spend a lot of time waiting for programs and games to load, and the startup time for a computer could be minutes. Since then a long time has passed, and with all the progress in technology and science you would think that todays computers would be fast as lightning.
But still I find myself waiting a lot. Especially on a PC, where programs can take ages to start, and keeps crashing now and then. It’s like it doesn’t matter how strong and fast computers gets, the programs are always a step ahead and too big for the computers to handle.
In: Technology
Because the second you build a computer with more resources people will design programs to consume those resources.
My first computer back in the early 1990s had programs that were considered huge if they were more than a few MBs in size. Today I use programs that are up near 100GB in size. They load in less time than those programs back in the early 1990s did.
They are much faster. If you tried to load the old stuff you waited for as a kid on a modern computer, it’d be very fast.
As our computers became more powerful, we can do more in them so code and graphics have become more complex.
Some of the stuff we do regularly would have taken hundreds of years on old hardware.
Computers are immensely faster than they used to be. We added a lot of complexity.
Doom ran at 320×200, in 8 bit color. It calculated the color of 64000 bytes of memory per frame, and 30 times per second was an okay performance.
The modern doom runs on my computer at 3840 * 2160, in 32 bit color, at 60 fps. It calculates the color for 33177600 bytes of memory per frame, meaning just by the amount of pixels, it takes 1000 times more work. In reality the complexity is far greater, because the original doom has an extremely primitive and simple rendering algorithm.
Of course thousands of times more complexity means it also works with far more data. Textures are bigger and take longer to load from disk, for instance.
My computer, the computer at work is Garbage, not all computers are made equal, it comes down to the parts that are in it as well as the load or work they are processing (sometimes on the background without you even knowing)
Our best computers have gotten incredibly fast and technology for combining computing power together has also grown significantly.
Your computer may feel slow for a number of reasons: likely either
– doing so many things at the same time for “convenience” (anti virus, syncing files, checking for updates, splitting updates, etc etc) or
– being underpowered relative to modern standards. For example, Windows wants to do certain things and expects a basic standard of computation power that is always increasing as they add features
Do you remember when you were 3 y.o. and thought walking/runnning was fast as you finally were able to do it?
With 6 you thought riding a bicycle was fast.
With 16 only a car would do, but with 25 you realized how slow your parents car was, since the car you bought was way faster?
Then you got your first speeding ticket because you completely overlooked how fast you were driving because it didn’t feel fast anymore.
PCs are faster and they do way more loading and preparing than they did ever before at start and overall, but we are used to that speed now and speed you get used to is average and not fast anymore.
The day I got my first SSD I was in awe about how fast my PC /programs were starting. Now I have SSDs for years and my PC feels slow at start when it really isn’t, except when I have 100 programs in auto start, but that’s my fault. A Formula 1 car would also be slow if it had to drag a truck load of stuff behind it when trying to get to maximum speed.
Also most people do not own the latest and most resource hungry programs and games, so less waiting.
If you need to be part of the “always the best/newest” crowd you will need to upgrade your machine to fit that and make sure drivers and Updates get updated regularly and from time to time cleaning up unused software, auto start and left over files is necessary. Like with the best Formula 1 cars, they are never done making them better and faster and getting rid of everything that slows them down, but then the other cars get faster too and the process starts over agein.
Because it takes more time and better developers to make efficient software. The people that are really good at it can earn a lot of money optimizing the software run in big datacenters, or on supercomputers. Normal programs are usually only optimized to the point the customers will tolerate the product, then the developers are pulled to a different project or tasked with adding new features rather than making the program run faster.
Program language is also an issue. languages that execute slower but are faster to program in have gotten more popular.
It’s sort of the same thing with your living space. If you have a 900 ft² apartment it’s going to seem very full and cluttered. Then you move into a 3,000 ft² home and after a while it’s going to seem really full and cluttered. Just like with computers the more capacity you have, you eventually find a way to fill it up and then overfill it. I assure you, you can build a computer that will run everything lightning fast, but it would be overkill. There is coordination between software programmers and hardware manufacturers to hit that sweet spot where you don’t pay for more computer than you need, just enough to run the programs properly. It’s a fine line so many consumers will fall on the slower side of things as hardware is expensive, and it makes it seem like your computer is never able to keep up with software.
1. Most people’s computers suck as they are effectively unmanaged. Even supposed experts I have worked with have home machines which are horrendously bogged down with junk that doesn’t need to be running. This is the ENTIRE cause of the fallacy that “computers get slower as they get older”. No, they don’t. You just let it gum up with crap and don’t know the difference between a program that’s just installed, and one that’s running ALL THE TIME for no reason.
2. Computers are doing a lot more nowadays, but that doesn’t account for much at all. Lots of what they are doing is unnecessary or done in a lazy way. When you turn some things off, the performance improves enormously.
3. You have obviously never seen a new PC, with sufficient RAM, NVMe drives, and nothing bogging it down. They FLY LIKE THE DAMN WIND.
4. Processor speed has plateaued. This is a physical limitation. At speeds at/beyond 5GHz, the time it takes for an electrical signal to cross even the smallest piece of silicon means that the following signal is starting at one end of the chip before the previous signal has finished. This causes problems with our design of processors. You can design a processor that would take account of this, but it would be incredibly complex to do so and not gain very much. 5GHz is a kind of natural limit for a room-temperature, household silicon device running on a clock-synchronous CPU. You aren’t going to get beyond that without a radical redesign of modern computer architecture. Given that in a matter of a few decades we went from 1MHz to 5GHz, it’s been amazingly fast progress, and we won’t see that like again without a major technological revolution.
5. Most of the waiting you see is nothing to do with the speed of the computer, but the design of the OS. Often it’s waiting on unrelated shite like DNS lookup on your Internet connection, thus making you think the computer is slow when really it’s been told to wait for a tiny, tiny answer from the Internet. It’s poor design. I can often Alt-Tab between a AAA game and a browser trying to draw a website, and the game doesn’t stutter, but the browser can feel like it’s dying. It’s because the browser is waiting on things other than local computer resources. It’s like saying “That highway is really slow” because you’re only looking at the electric wheelchair that’s going down the emergency lane and the rest of the road is empty.
6. As an IT guy: Some of the slowness you experience is purely imaginary. The computer is ready to go in all respects, but it just “feels” slow. Other programs function super-fast, the CPU is barely at a couple of % CPU, as are the RAM, the disk storage, the networking, etc. but it just “feels” slow. As an example, turn off animation settings on your Android phone. It’s just the same phone, but it feels FAR more snappy and responsive. Apple learned this with their menu bar, it’s all pre-cached bitmaps so it LOOKS like it’s really snappy and responsive, even if the computer is being dog-slow because it’s at 100% CPU. It’s a clever trick, that fools you into thinking that it’s a faster machine. It’s not.
7. No program should crash. It means you have a problem – either your hardware is faulty and unreliable, your software drivers are poorly written, or you are simply asking too much of the hardware (e.g. you’re using up ALL your RAM). Programs shouldn’t crash. Full stop. End of sentence.
Run Resource Monitor (bring up Task Manager and it has a link in there to Resource Monitor) on your machine and see where the bottleneck lies. If anything is churning towards 100% when you’re just casually using the machine, you have a bottleneck. You’ll notice if you have an NVMe storage that it’s very difficult to max out the storage speed… but if you have a clunky old hard disk (they are obsolete now, upgrade them to SSD/NVMe and throw them away!) in a poorly managed machine it’ll be churning on the disk any time you do anything.
Pretty much – computers are fast. Yes, they’ve hit one technical wall, but there’s no reason your computer shouldn’t be flying along and able to do anything that you throw at it (and trust me, as an IT manager, a developer, a gamer and someone who lives on their computer 24/7, I can tell you that I throw 10 times more at my machine than any ordinary person, even one that considers themselves a power user).
Anything else is because you’re not looking at the right thing, or you have dodgy or obsolete hardware.
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