Computer Speed Gains Erased By Modern Software
hackaday.com
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[Julio] has an older computer sitting on a desk, and recorded a quick video with it showing how fast this computer can do seemingly simple things, like open default Windows applications including t…

Interesting take on comparability vs performance. I gotta imaging capturing user data and sending to a cloud collector is also a big culprit.

@PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world
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1Y

Stop buying games that need 220gb of drive space, an Nvidia gtx 690000 and a 7263641677 core processor then. More than a 60gb download size means I pirate it unless it’s a really really damn good game. Games with no drm that can be run without a $20k computer, I buy.

Games are far from the worst examples of this. Largely games are still very high performance. Some lax policies on sizes are not the norm, most data is large because it’s just high detail.

The real losses are simple desktop apps being entire web engines.

Richard
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11Y

Games are definitely not very well optimised. For one, most indie publishers are artists rather than software developers, which means that they do not have the technical expertise to properly program their applications, especially on the OpenGL/Vulkan/Direct3D side of things. Large video game corporations, in contrast, are indeed quite capable of reducing the hardware requirements and increasing the performance of their games, but they are often not willing, as became particularly evident recently with Jedi: Survivor, where a major public outcry was required for them to fix the game’s performance problems, which they have done quite competently.

Most indie 3D games are not programmed from scratch, working directly with Vulkan, OpenGL, etc. Instead, they’re using a licensed game engine like Unreal. A lot of AAA game houses didn’t like the game engine license fees eating into profit margins so they came up with their own engines that they maintain internally with varying levels of success.

@MurrayL@lemmy.world
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11Y

deleted by creator

TwoGems
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Rabbits

@CaptPretentious@lemmy.world
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Massive amounts of telemetry data and nearly every app these days just being a web app just chews through your hardware. We use Teams at work and it’s just god awful. Hell, even steam is a problem. Even having your friends list open can cause a loss to your fps in some games.

@deranger@lemmy.world
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91Y

“web app” gets used disparagingly frequently, but they can be done well. I use a couple PWAs; one for generating flight plans for simming (simbrief) and what I’m writing this on currently, wefwef. I think they’re fine in the right circumstances, and it’s harder for them to collect telemetry compared to a native app.

@robgami@lemmy.world
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71Y

I think PWAs use your already installed browser whereas apps like teams use electron which bundles its own browser which a lot of people see as wasteful.

Given how prevalent web technologies are, I am honestly surprised there isn’t a push towards having one common Electron installation per version and having apps share that. Each app bundling its own Electron is just silly.

@marx2k@lemmy.world
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101Y

Teams eats up my macos memory something awful and it’s just sitting there… no one saying anything.

wtf I hate it

Hasn’t this always been the case? Software development is a balance between efficiency of code execution and efficiency of code creation. 20 years ago people had to code directly in assembly to make games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but today they can use C++ (or even more abstract systems like Unity)

We hit the point where hardware is fast enough for most users about 15 years ago, and ever since we’ve been using faster hardware to allow for lazier code creation (which is good, since it means we get more software per man-hour worked)

Your examples are honestly terrible. C++ is a fast language, and it’s not easy to write fast x86 Assembly, especially faster than what the C++ compiler would spit out by itself. C++ doesn’t cause a slowdown by itself.

20 years ago people could code in Python and JavaScript, or about any high-level language popular today. Most programming languages are fairly old and some were definitely use for game development in the past (like C++), and game engines definitely date back way before 2003, or 1999 when RollerCoaster Tycoon was released.

RCT is an anomaly, not the rule. People who didn’t need to wouldn’t program in Assembly, unless they were crazy and wanted a challenge. You missed the mark by about a decade or so, even then we’re talking about consoles with extremely limited resources like the NES and not PC games like DOOM (1993), which was written in C.

downpunxx
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201Y

twas always thus, software development is gaseous in that it expands to take up all the area it is placed inside, this is both by the nature of software engineering taking the quickest route to solving any action, as well as by design of collusion between operating system manufacturers (read Microsoft and Apple) and the hardware platform manufacturers they support and promote. this has been happening since the dawn of personal computer systems, when leapfrogging processor, ram, hard drive, bus, and network eventually leads to hitherto improbably extravagant specs bogged down to uselessness. it’s the bane and very nature of the computing ecosphere itself.

@Gecko@lemmy.world
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It’s not just applications. I recently “upgraded” two of my PCs from Windows 8.1 to to Windows 10. Ever since that having the mouse polling rate above like 125Hz and moving the cursor would result in frame drops in games.

This happened across two machines with different hardware, the only common denominator being the switch in Windows version. Tried a bunch of troubleshooting until I ultimately upgraded CPU + RAM due to RAM becoming faulty some time later on one of the machines. That finally resolved the issue.

So yeah, having to upgrade your hardware not because it’s showing its age but rather because the software running on it has become more inefficient is a real problem IMO.

Can confirm 90 percent of modern software is dogshit. Thanks electron for making it worse.

Can confirm 90 percent of modern software is dogshit. Thanks electron for making it worse.

I hadn’t considered the latency of abstraction due to non-native development. I just assumed modern apps are loaded with bloatware, made more sophisticated by design, and perhaps less elegantly programmed on average.

@0ddysseus@lemmy.world
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81Y

goddammit. I was watching this going “hey, my system is like that!” Check and yes, my 24 core Ryzen 5900X with 32GB ram with NVMe drive is painfully slow opening things like calculator, terminal etc. I am running Fedora 38 with KDE desktop… That the hell man

@neuromancer@lemmy.world
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deleted by creator

@Verpous@lemmy.world
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21Y

A tale as old as computers. Here’s a very good talk about it: https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk

The telemetry thing is why I almost always turn that off in every program that has the option to disable it. You can really see the difference in a lot of games, especially online games, with just that 1 thing. It’s insane.

@Raphael@lemmy.world
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11Y

removed by mod

@Falmarri@lemmy.world
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11Y

Seriously. I have to use windows for now, after coming from linux. Windows just feels slow as fuck.

@nyawow@lemmy.world
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01Y

NixOS and Hyprland masterrace again

@MurrayL@lemmy.world
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31Y

Time to uninstall Windows 11 and go back to 3.11! Sure, it won’t run anything made since the mid 90s at best, but what it does run will surely be lightning fast!!

Jeffool
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I would be curious about the feasibility of a “performance mode” that was basically “reboot you into a “single program” mode”. I assume it would be unreasonable given so much software relies on the tools modern OSes provide, unless the software itself was made with this in mind.

You’d imagine some giant like Adobe would figure out a way to run dedicated machines, given they have so much software that uses lots of resources. But then, as best as I would find it for games, I imagine most people don’t want to give up alt-tabbing to their web browsers.

Edit: Besides. The real benefits would hit until you were coding to the metal anyway, right? Assuming that’s still feasible too.

A lightweight Linux distro can get you the same results with current software. Hell, even Ubuntu will. The deterrent has always been that you have to tinker with it to get it to work right, but that’s a lot less true now then it was in the past. I recently installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my wife’s old iMac and it’s lightening fast and worked straight out of the box with no tinkering whatsoever. It’s about 20 times faster than it was running iOS.

Somebody released a Windows 3.1 ChatGPT client a couple weeks ago. So you’re golden!

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