Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> A thousand times faster? I have yet to see anybody with 56 Mbit/sec 
> broadband. ;-)

  It was a figure of speech. And it wasn't all that far-fetched either.
Some people *do* have even faster connections than that, and at a rational
price. A friend of mine could download over 10 MB/s (mega*bytes*, not bits).

  Ok, maybe not with ADSL. OTOH, 24 Mbit/s ADSL is completely normal
(for example I could upgrade to that right now if I wanted to).

> >> 10 years ago, so much was possible with so little hardware. Kinda makes 
> >> you feel sad...
> > 
> >   Except that you couldn't download and watch 8GB of anime encoded
> > with H.264 (or even divx, for that matter). :P

> Er... well even today, downloading *8GB* is rather challenging.

  Not really, if you have a fast connection and good seeders.

> But yes, not so long ago, writing a program that "achieves realtime MP3 
> decoding" was seen as a major achievement, and *encoding* could take 
> days. I was shocked to discover the other day that my copy of WinAmp is 
> using about 0.25% CPU to decode a Vorbis file in realtime. [Recall that 
> Vorbis is more CPU-intensive than MP3.]

  More shocking to me is that even many-years-old computers can *encode*
MPEG-4 *in real-time*, especially knowing a bit about what that requires.

> I find it staggering how my Amiga took over 2 *hours* to render 
> SKYVASE.POV (uh, why?), yet PCs toay can do it in mere seconds. At a 
> much higher resolution. With AA.

  There's an example scene which comes with POV-Ray which is even more
telling: scenes/advanced/piece3/piece3.pov. It says:

// Due to the large number of objects, you will probably have to
// have a lot of memory to render this scene.
// Rendering time using a 25Mhz 386 w/Cyrix fpu is approximately 60 hours.

  With a top-of-the-line modern PC you can render that exact scene in
almost real-time (using the rt-rendering feature of pov3.7).

> And yet, at the same time, it *still* takes forever for certain 
> applications to start up. WTF?

  Back then programs allocated and initialized something like 200 kB of
memory and had to read about that much data from files. Nowadays it's
the same, but changing the kB to MB.

> [Most exasperating is the length of time TF2 takes to start. But given 
> that it's loading several GB of texture data from disk, I'll let that 
> one go.]

  It's not only loading (and probably decompressing) the textures and
models, it's probably transferring them to your graphics card. This is
not one of the fastest possible operations even today (although faster
than reading from disk).

> PS. Seriously. Why the hell is SKYVASE.POV so slow? It contains, like, a 
> handful of quadratic primitives and a simple texture. There's no 
> reflection or refraction, IIRC there's only 1 point-light source... why 
> is it so slow?

  Because calculating intersections with hundreds of thousands of rays
is cpu-intensive?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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