[dead]
The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
211–220 of 842 posts
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#212I have been thinking about this a lot ever since I played a game called "Balatro". In this game nothing extraordinary happens in terms of computing - some computations get done, some images are shuffled around on the screen, the effects are sparse. The hardware requirements aren't much by modern standards, but still, this game could be ported 1:1 to a machine with Pentium II with a 3dfx graphics card. And yet it demands so much more - not a lot by today standards, but still. I am tempted to try to run it on a 2010 netbook to see if it even boots up.
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#213There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…
The user tolerance has changed as well because the web 2.0 "perpetual beta" and SaaS replacing other distribution models.
Also Microsoft has educated now several generations to accept that software fails and crashes.
Because "all software is the same", customers may not appreciate good software when they're used to live with bad software.
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#214Meanwhile on every programmer's 101 forum: "Space is cheap! Premature optimization is the root of all evil! Dev time > runtime!"
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#215There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…
I have that washing machine btw. I saw the AI branding and had a chuckle. I bought it anyway because it was reasonably priced (the washer was $750 at Costco).
In my case I bought it because LG makes appliances that fit under the counter if you don't have much space.
It bothered me the AI BS, but the price was good and the machine works fine.
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.
Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…
Spotify takes 7 seconds from clicking on its icon to playing a song on a 2024 top-of-the-range MacBook Pro. Navigating through albums saved on your computer can take several seconds. Double clicking on a song creates a 1/4sec pause.
This is absolutely remarkable inefficiency considering the application's core functionality (media players) was perfected a quarter century ago.
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#217There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…
The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even.
What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a competitive advantage in a competitive market. Duh. I’m sure I knew and said that in college and for years before my own startup attempt, but this time I really felt it in my bones. It suddenly made me realize exactly why everything in the market is mediocre, and why high quality things always get worse when they get more popular. Pressure to reduce costs grows with the scale of a product. Duh. People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality). Duh. What companies do is pay the minimum they need in order to stay alive & profitable. I don’t mean it never happens, sometimes people get excited and spend for short bursts, young companies often try to make high quality stuff, but eventually there will be an inevitable slide toward minimal spending.
There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have.
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#218I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X. If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster. If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice: I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabi…
> If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that) It doesn’t work like that. If an image processing algorithm takes 2 instructions per pixel, adding a check to every access could 3-4x the cost. This is why if you dictate bounds checking then the language becomes uncompetitive for certain tasks. The vast majority of cases it doesn’t matter at all - much less than 5%. I think safe/unsafe o…
It's not that simple either - normally, if you're doing some loops over a large array of pixels, say, to perform some operation to them, there will only be a couple of bounds checks before the loop starts, checking the starting and ending conditions of the loops, not re-doing the bounds check for every pixel.
So very rarely should it be anything like 3-4x the cost, though some complex indexing could cause it to happen, I suppose. I agree scopes are a decent way to handle it!
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the value in the human is an informed opinion which is hard to program I don't think I ever used a human for that. They are usually very uninformed about everything that's not their standard operational procedure or some current promotional materials.
20 years ago when I was at McDonalds there would be several customers per shift (so many 1 in 500?) who didn't know what they wanted and asked for a recommendation. Since I worked there I ate there often enough to know if the special was something I liked or not.
Bless your souls. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I just personally had only bad experiences so I actively avoid human interactive input in my commercial activity.
Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're comparing the art(!) of two different games, that targeted two different sets of hardware while using the ideal hardware for one and not the other. Kind of a terrible example.
> You're comparing the art(!) The art direction, modelling and animation work is mostly fine, the worse look results from the lack of dynamic lighting and ambient occlusion in the Oblivion Remaster when switching Lumen (UE5's realtime global illumination feature) to the lowest setting, this results in completely flat lighting for the vegetation but is needed to get an acceptable base frame rate (it doesn't solve the…
> …when switching Lumen (UE5's realtime global illumination feature) to the lowest setting, this results in completely flat lighting for the vegetation but is needed to get an acceptable base frame rate (it doesn't solve the random stuttering though).
This also happens to many other UE5 games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 where they try to push the graphics envelope with expensive techniques and most people without expensive hardware have to turn the settings way down (even use things like upscaling and framegen which further makes the experience a bit worse, at least when the starting point is very bad and you have to use them as a crutch), often making these modern games look worse than something a decade old.
Whatever UE5 is doing (or rather, how so many developers choose to use it) is a mistake now and might be less of a mistake in 5-10 years when the hardware advances further and becomes more accessible. Right now it feels like a ploy by the Big GPU to force people to upgrade to overpriced hardware if they want to enjoy any of these games; or rather, sillyness aside, is an attempt by studios to save resources by making the artists spend less time on faking and optimizing effects and detail that can just be brute forced by the engine.
In contrast, most big CryEngine and idTech games run great even on mid range hardware and still look great.