Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas...
by mike_hearn on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:51AM
(#50412125)
It's almost entirely about screen resolutions. In the Turbo Pascal era the screen probably had 640x480 pixels or 307,200 pixels in total. The screen I'm looking at now is 5120x2880 = ~14.7M pixels.
If an app is maximized it has to render ~48x more pixels per frame, probably with anti-aliased text which older systems didn't use. Doing that on the CPU is not only visibly slow in many cases, but a waste of CPU time that could be better used for actual app logic. OpenGL happens to be a convenient and portable way to get the GPU to do work for you, at the cost of some memory, so GL it is.
If an app is maximized it has to render ~48x more pixels per frame, probably with anti-aliased text which older systems didn't use. Doing that on the CPU is not only visibly slow in many cases, but a waste of CPU time that could be better used for actual app logic. OpenGL happens to be a convenient and portable way to get the GPU to do work for you, at the cost of some memory, so GL it is.