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
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.
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