https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-N2830-vs-...
It took 700ms or so for my server process to even start on a r.pi - I'd noticed a brief delay on my laptop, but it was so awful on the pi that I ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing. Anyway, come Monday I pulled the changes onto my fancy laptop and they made a noticable difference in subtle responsiveness. Everything just felt faster. I probably wouldn't have even noticed if I didn't spend that time programming on the pi.
Facebook has "slow internet thursdays" or something, where once a week developers can opt in to experience their internal facebook dev environments in the same way it feels for people on slow connections in poorer countries. I think that sort of thing would be good for all of us. Programming in constrained environments makes our software work better everywhere.
There are several race conditions in many webpages related to waiting for video or images to load.
Tangentially my late 2018 i5 MBA feels sluggish compared to my 2014 MBP. Simple things like switching windows are noticeably slower and janky. Unfortunately my 2014 MBP has an no longer supported NVidia GPU by Chrome/Firefox/Photoshop so I may have to upgrade but I know it will basically feel no different than what I have except I'll have the touch bar which I'm not really interested in.
I believe there is an option in the Performance pane to throttle the CPU in Chrome.
Some games supposedly have been optimised similarly by running parts of it on a C64 or Amiga. I cant recall the game or studio but John Carmack comes to mind.
This improves both motion quality and latency. When poorly designed software makes you wait multiple frames, halving (or better) the frame time makes a noticeable difference.
I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and experience that somewhat consistently rather than have such disparate performances.
It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX.
However, you are definitely correct when it comes to GUI productivity applications. Drawing text in boxes is apparently much harder than rendering an immersive world in real time. The implications are too disturbing to consider, so I do not.
https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543
It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.
...if you're playing with v-sync :-P. I got a (rather expensive too) 165Hz monitor recently and the main benefit is to lessen the lag that Windows' forced composition (which also does v-sync) has. But in games i always played with v-sync turned off (i do not mind the tearing, unless it only happens at a fixed position i never really notice it) and the responsiveness was already very high. And on Linux and older versions of Windows where i could disable the compositor, i already had high responsiveness on the GUI too (if anything i feel like even with the 165Hz monitor, the Windows 10 desktop is still not as responsive as Windows 7 and previous versions of Windows were with the compositor disabled).
Though a large issue with that is how modern monitors work. I also have a CRT connected to an older computer here which can do 120Hz and the motion feel is considerably better to the point where i wonder what the hell was wrong with people in the mid-2000s to switch away from CRTs when in pretty much every other area except size and weight, the CRTs were superior - especially at the time (better image quality, better and true dark colors, better responsiveness/no 'response time', higher refresh rates, higher resolutions, variable resolutions with no scaling artifacts, etc). In fact a reason i decided to try a 165Hz monitor was because i recently connected that CRT to a machine that can do 120Hz and have some games to run at 120fps and wanted that experience for my main PC too.
(sadly i do have a feeling that if i hadn't used a CRT the last few years i'd be more enthusiastic about my new monitor since i do not think the currently technology can do much better - at least without going to something like that gigantic $3k OLED monitor though even that would annoy me for its size)
High refresh rate monitors tend to support freesync or Gsync. For minimum latency disable vsync, enable free / gsync. Only enable vsync if your fps is above the monitors refresh rate. Alternatively you can enable a framerate limit just below the refresh rate.
Even supports VR. '80s Cyberpunk matrix here I come!
pulls out a virtual gun to kill a process dead
Take the same idea and put it into Unreal Engine. Add further OS interactions like files, maybe a floating virtual window for web browsing etc.
The UX has to be done very well though otherwise you are a prediction by TV show Community:
A lot of software, especially websites, have annoying waits for Vsync that are not needed in them.
When you update styles that triggers a reflow or repaint, then you can introduce a wait for VSync in your website thats stalls flow until it is finished.
If you add 3 frames of delay at 60fps then it's 50ms of delay, and only 25ms at 120fps. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that 25ms can be the difference between feeling totally fluid and not, and a lot of websites are even worse than that.
Software can be IO bound, Network bound, CPU bound, memory bound.
Modern software is Vsync bound!
The very, very first thing I did at my last company after migrating to a retina Macbook Pro was go into our monitoring systems and configure it to render the graphs at 2x size and then scale them down on the client.
These days, it's more like if they previously had less than 12 GB of memory and were often swapping. Having a few dozen tabs open isn't that uncommon and interactive websites (Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs) can use an enormous amount of RAM.
Examples:
https://github.com/Tecate/bitmap-fonts
If you're on 4K you can simulate how they look on 1080p with 2x integer nearest neighbor scaling.
The by current standards normal sharpness is nice too (1080 screens aren't really blurry, they're pixely).
I basically went back to 1080p because of this.
Eye resolution is ridiculously high. There's a reason companies started marketing 'retina' displays.
Small fonts will not always fall into discrete pixels which is especially true if the resolution is not very high. Which requires you to do antialiasing or mangle the characters.
Higher resolution displays allows you to render them more faithfully.
4. If they previously had an early generation of Core CPU like a Sandy Bridge that suffered great performance hit due to vulnerability, and then moved to an Ice Lake, or better, an AMD...
1. If they previously had less than 4GB of memory and were often swapping
2. If they previously had a spinning HDD and moved to an SSD
3. If they previously had a really low end CPU like something outside the Core range, and moved to an i5 or better
Beyond that, all the other stuff is either a marginal performance gain or a convenience feature. The only other "must have" thing from the last few years that I wouldn't want to lose is a high res monitor, but that falls into the convenience category for me and not performance.
Power users like your family member got quantifiable benefit from performance upgrades over the years, but if they were already running decent hardware like a Macbook Pro, they didn't get any life altering upgrades. Taking 15 seconds to compile vs 30 is definitely faster, but you still have to sit and wait each time you push the button, so any habits that you learned from the 30 second pause will probably continue.