Modern software performance is firmly in its “beyond parody” stage

Re:Modern software performance is firmly in its “beyond paro... by seba_dos1 on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @11:39AM (#35358810)

Being able to hit 60fps is just a single prerequisite for low latency, but it's far from enough. The application may be able to render itself consistently even in 2ms just fine, but effect of your action won't appear on the screen until much later unless you make your whole stack (including the OS) surprisingly complex (which is worth doing in case of competitive video games running in fullscreen, not for applications).

Seems like you're simply not aware of complexities of the display path. Please make a simple windowed OpenGL application displaying a single triangle in thousands FPS that changes color when you press a key and measure its latency, you may be surprised ;)

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Re:Modern software performance is firmly in its “beyond paro... by jesse__ on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @12:31PM (#35359602)

Okay, I see what you're getting at now, and yes, there are a few frames of latency between the time the app is done drawing and the time pixels are in front of your eyeballs, but that is _completely_ missing my point, and the point of the tweet.

If we're splitting hairs about how we define how long an application takes to update, we've already won.

In reality, we're talking about an app that should take ~0.01s to perform an operation (update a rectangular region with text), that's taking 1.0s instead. And that's THE OPTIMIZED VERSION. In the real world, we've already lost, which is what Casey was pointing out in his tweet.

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Re:Modern software performance is firmly in its “beyond paro... by seba_dos1 on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @12:41PM (#35359754)

The only measure the user cares about when it comes to snappiness is input-to-display latency, and the whole point of my comment was to be realistic about it. A chat app won't hit 16.6ms latency, but it doesn't have to. 100-200ms is realistic and perfectly fine, and if you don't manage to hit it, something is seriously wrong with your application.

And yes, of course, something is seriously wrong with a lot of applications these days, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.

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