Are Computers Still Getting Faster? [video]

Re:Are Computers Still Getting Faster? [video] by nothis on Sunday January 10, 2016 @06:46PM (#10877824)

I like to mention soundcards as a great example of this. For almost 20 years, the sound chip included on motherboards is all most people need. Sure, there's a hardcore niche of enthusiasts who want to plug in their keyboards and whatnot, but my motherboard can do 5.1 surround sound at a quality I could not distinguish from perfection, the bottleneck are my speakers.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, sound was a huge deal, going from synthetic beeps to full audio playback and you needed to fiddle with a dedicated soundcard to enjoy the latest breakthroughs. Nowadays, hardly anyone bothers because all computers have "good enough" sound out of the box.

I find it quite fascinating to think whether something similar might be possible for, say, graphics cards. It seems impossible now, but imagine a monitor at the max resolution your eye can see and real time 3D graphics with enough polygons to never see an edge and all the basic shading/lighting problems solved to Pixar levels... that might be less than 10 years away.

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Re:Are Computers Still Getting Faster? [video] by seanp2k2 on Sunday January 10, 2016 @07:08PM (#10877901)

The same thing is pretty much true for graphics as of about 10 years ago. Most consumers who don't play games are fine with integrated graphics, or don't understand / care about the difference discrete graphics would make. If all you're doing is browsing the web, email, Facebook, chat apps, etc, a dedicated GPU probably isn't worth it for most people. This might be changing as more non-games utilize GPU compute power, but integrated graphics are also getting somewhat more powerful as compared to entry-level discrete GPUs. If anyone has a good comparison for this change over time, that'd be interesting to see.

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