John Carmack suggests the world could run on older hardware - if we optimized software better

[Hooda Thunkett]

"LaurieWired suggests that 30 years after Z-Day, the world would become a dystopia where computing resembles the 1970s or 1980s. The modern internet would vanish, replaced by sneakernet data exchanges on SSDs and efforts to safeguard valuable desktop hardware from confiscation."

Don't threaten me with a good time! /S

But, seriously, if anyone is going to take software optimization seriously, it's going to have to come from the executive level. As long as relatively cheap hardware improvements can carry software along, it won't be a priority to optimize software. Once that improved hardware becomes more expensive than optimizing the software, the priorities will change.

 

[wiyosaya]

With all the useless "hey watch this crap" like when files are copying and useless scanning directories when you select all the files then hit delete, personally, I think Microsoft spends its time doing the exact opposite of what Carmack is suggesting. It seems like Microsoft has made each generation of Windows successively slower.

 

[Athlonite69]

I remember the Demo scene back in the late 90's early 2000's
A group called Fabrusch put out a demo called FR08 it ran both visuals and audio for 15 minutes in a file size of 64KB yes that's KiloBytes hows that you ask it was because of tight coding none of this we fecked something up ok just put a jump to line BS coding we see today there's to much of that going on and ofcourse it just makes games or OS's bigger and bigger

 

[trgz]

I remember the Demo scene back in the late 90's early 2000's
A group called Fabrusch put out a demo called FR08 it ran both visuals and audio for 15 minutes in a file size of 64KB yes that's KiloBytes hows that you ask it was because of tight coding none of this we fecked something up ok just put a jump to line BS coding we see today there's to much of that going on and ofcourse it just makes games or OS's bigger and bigger

I remember those, and probably have some good ones archived somewhere. They were most impressive IIRC, and they sort of inspired me to write a self building Excel spreadsheet, ie it was pure code that created sheets, tables, formulae, pivot tables, charts, and its own code, all from scratch, and ready for data - it was a fun idea (and stopped me getting bored), but no way as clever as those Demos

 

[marz3nith]

I miss this guy; the brilliant IDtech engine coder who doubles as a literal rocket scientist and tunes Ferraris lol. Nobody coded like this guy. He always coded in C++ and was legendary at it, that's for sure. For a minute there, he was pretty much dictating the direction of hardware evolution--even suggested Microsoft up the 360 memory, which they did, and suggested the industry as a whole ditch the multi-core processors, in favor of single core performance because? Not unlike today, games scale up horribly with each additional core, being primarily single-core performance. Right now you can have a 4-core processor and lead the GPU benchmarks and game well, provided single core performance is great on that processor. The benefits end almost entirely after 6 cores. I wish he'd come back but I highly doubt he wants nothing to do with Bethesda era ID.