Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nightski 946 days ago
There's a lot more to it than just increasing the resolution. Graphics, animations, font rendering quality, huge images, the list goes on.
2 comments
userbinator 946 days ago
Most of that is GPU-accelerated anyway so the OS / CPU doesn't need to do much beyond telling the GPU what to do.
link
TheOtherHobbes 946 days ago
That's clearly not true.

I can run a full virtual music studio on my Mac, with tens of channels, each with a collection of plugins, and multiple samples and audio files streaming off SSD at the same time.

None of that is GPU accelerated - except maybe the UI, which is split across three 4k monitors

On Windows 95 I could barely play a single WAV at once, and a dual monitor system was an exotic luxury.

Hardware has gotten a lot faster, and the software can do more without crashing. (Mostly.)

The real problem has been the move to browser+cloud for productivity applications. The OS is a front end for the browser, which is a front end for remote compute. This is hugely slow and inefficient compared to making everything work locally, and perhaps including some cloud-ish hooks for sharing.

link
M95D 945 days ago
Graphics: Win3.10 had just the right amount.

Animations: NO, THANK YOU!

Font rendering quality: It increases with font size, which is needed for high res displays. Besides, current font authors don't waste any time doing manual font hinting like the old fonts had. Good luck having crisp font rendering without manual hinting! It's all just a blur since antialiasing was introduced.

Huge images: How huge? Win95 without any patches can allocate 500MB to a single program (image viewer). That's 170 megapixels @ 24bit-color.

link