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How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

colin-scott.github.io

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Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#161

Post by andai »

capitainenemo wrote: post #83
horsawlarway wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... SSDs are so much faster than spinning disk it's not even funny. I literally refuse to run a machine that boots its main OS from spinning disk anymore. The 60 bucks to throw an SSD into it is so incredibly cheap for what you get. My wife's work gave her a (fairly basic but still fine) thinkpad - except they left the main drive as a fucking 5400rpm hdd. Then acted like assclowns when we repeatedly showed them t…

The living room media/gaming machine at home is an 8 terabyte spinning rust. I didn't bother with a separate SSD boot partition. It's currently been running for 23 days. Booting takes ~15 seconds even on spinning rust for a reasonable linux distro, so I'm not going to stress about those 15 seconds every couple of months. total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31Gi 4.6Gi 21Gi 158Mi 5.1Gi 25Gi Swap: 37Gi 617M…

Linux still works OK on spinny disk (though exponentially worse every year as applications trend towards bloated Electron), but Win10 is nigh unusable on a spinny disk (technically works but very unpleasant). It works quite comfortably on ancient hardware though given a SSD and sufficient RAM.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#162

Post by ChuckMcM »

ZainRiz wrote: post #142
ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

Not an intuitive thing but the data is fascinating. A couple of notes of people who are confused by it: 1) The 'ns' next to the box is a graph legend not a data label (normally that would be in a box labeled legend to distinguish it from graph data) 2) The weird box and rectangle thing on the top is a slider, I didn't notice that until I was looking at the code and said "what slider?" 3) The only changes from 2005 to…

Actually, this data is all false from 2012 onwards. The code was written back in 2012 and is using numbers from back then to _guess_ what future numbers would look like! (I was fooled by it too) See https://github.com/colin-scott/interactive_latencies/issues/...

Looks like a fun project to bring it up to date.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#163

Post by Gigachad »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #160
Gigachad wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are diminishing returns. If a laptop could play games at the quality of a top end PC today, would people really want to pay for an external streaming service, deal with latency, etc just so they can get the last 1% of graphical improvements? We have seen there are so many aspects of computing where once it’s good enough, it’s good enough. Like how onboard DACs got good enough that even the cheap ones are suffic…

> If a laptop could play games at the quality of a top end PC today, would people really want to pay for an external streaming service, deal with latency, etc just so they can get the last 1% of graphical improvements? Think of it a different direction: if/when cloud rendering AAA graphics is practical, you can get a very low friction Netflix like experience where you just sit down and go.

IMO the service of netflix is the content library and not the fact it's streaming. If the entire show downloaded before playing, it would only be mildly less convenient than streaming it. But I don't think the streaming adds that much convenience to gaming. If your internet is slow enough that downloading the game beforehand is a pain, then streaming is totally out of the question. And gaming is way way less tolerant of network disruption since you can't buffer anything.

Cloud gaming seemingly only helps in the case when you have weak hardware but want to play AAA games. If we could put "good enough" graphics in every device, there would be no need to stream. And I think in 10 years probably every laptop will have built in graphics that are so good that cloud gaming is more trouble than its worth. It might sound unrealistic to say there is a good enough but I think a lot of things have already reached this point. These days screen DPI is largely good enough, sound quality is good enough, device weight/slimness is good enough, etc.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#164

Post by pizza »

TillE wrote: post #56
gameswithgo wrote: post #25

An instructive thing here is that a lot of stuff has not improved since ~2004 or so, and working around those things that have not improved (memory latency from ram all the way down to l1 cache really) requires fine control of memory layout and minimizing cache pollution, which is difficult to do with all of our popular garbage collected languages, even harder with languages that don't offer memory layout controls, a…

It's pretty remarkable that, for efficient data processing, it's super super important to care about memory layout / cache locality in intimate detail, and this will probably be true until something fundamental changes about our computing model. Yet somehow this is fairly obscure knowledge unless you're into serious game programming or a similar field.

Differentiable programming is becoming more and more popular. If there were accurate models of memory/cache behavior, we could predict how code changes would change performance due to CPU behavior, and might be able to get programming tools that can make this way more visible to people who don't know about it. But I have my doubts it will be as easy as I make it sound - and I don't think I make it sound all that easy either :)

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#165

Post by Gigachad »

0xCMP wrote: post #132
Gigachad wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are diminishing returns. If a laptop could play games at the quality of a top end PC today, would people really want to pay for an external streaming service, deal with latency, etc just so they can get the last 1% of graphical improvements? We have seen there are so many aspects of computing where once it’s good enough, it’s good enough. Like how onboard DACs got good enough that even the cheap ones are suffic…

I think what you're missing is that 1) you still need to install and maintain it and there are many trends even professionally that want to avoid that 2) just cause you could get it many may not want it. I could easily see people settle for a nice M1 MBA or M1 iMac and just stream the games if their internet is fine. Heck, wouldn't it be nicer to play some PC games in the living room like you can do with SteamLink? 3…

I think the new macbooks are more a proof that cloud streaming won't be needed. Apple is putting unreal amounts of speed in low power devices. If the M9 Macbook could produce graphics better than the gaming PCs of today, would anyone bother cloud streaming when the built in processing produces a result which is good enough. I'm not sure maintenance really plays much of a part, there is essentially no maintenance of local games since the clients take care of managing it all for you.

Massive shared state might be something which is useful. I have spent some time thinking about it and the only use case I can think of is highly detailed physics simulations with destructible environments in multi player games where synchronization becomes a nightmare traditionally since minor differences cascade in to major changes in the simulation.

But destructible environments and complex physics are a trend which came and went. Even in single player games where its easy, they take too much effort to develop and are simply a gimmick to players which adds only a small amount of value. Everything else seems easier to just pass messages around to synchronize state.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#167

Post by gurjeet »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #162
ZainRiz wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this data is all false from 2012 onwards. The code was written back in 2012 and is using numbers from back then to _guess_ what future numbers would look like! (I was fooled by it too) See https://github.com/colin-scott/interactive_latencies/issues/...

Looks like a fun project to bring it up to date.

Where would one lookup such data, if one is interested in updating the code.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#168

Post by ChuckMcM »

gurjeet wrote: post #167
ChuckMcM wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like a fun project to bring it up to date.

Where would one lookup such data, if one is interested in updating the code.

I would start by going through the Anandtech reviews of the major processor and storage announcements. They generally do a great job of benchmarking and go into pretty good detail. Datasheets from manufacturers would also be useful although not all data is routinely provided.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#169

Post by bmitc »

dekhn wrote: post #97
bmitc wrote: post #13

Today I learned that I don't know any of these numbers that "every" programmer should know. Where do I turn in my programmer card, Jeff Dean?

This was a doc handed to incoming Google engineers (along with Jeff's resume) to help assimilate them. MOst if not all of these came up at some point in the development of google.com and making decisions about (for example) whether to send an intercontinental RPC or look something up locally, or to put some part of the web index in RAM/disk. Don't read it as "you should have known this", read it as "you should know t…

Ah, so this title/article is out of context then, because not every place is Google. Thank you for providing the context.

And his resume was distributed? Why?

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#170

Post by saagarjha »

gurjeet wrote: post #167
ChuckMcM wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like a fun project to bring it up to date.

Where would one lookup such data, if one is interested in updating the code.

This is the kind of thing you’d typically experimentally verify rather than look up.
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