5 ms·

30 year old hardware didn't have to render fancy antialiased fonts at 3840x2160 @ 144Hz.

• vidarh 5y ago
  My computer in the 80s ran at 7.16MHz and a single core. The CPU speedup has increased far more than the amount of data to be moved even at the kind of setup you're describing.
  • floatboth 5y ago
    Data rates for display have increased very much too. Don't underestimate the, uhh, "how rectangles work" factor – doubling the resolution means doubling both width and height, so quadrupling the pixel count. 80s computers also used lots of special hardware for graphics output, they didn't software render everything ;)
    • vidarh 5y ago
      Yes, but as I said the increase in data rates has not been anywhere near as fast as the increase in CPU speed, even with the unusal example you gave. As for special hardware for graphics output, that's not really true. Some, sure. My Amiga had a basic blitter. But all that allowed for that helped a terminal was scrolling at a few times higher speed than the CPU - it was limited by the memory bus speed. That was revolutionary at the time. Most other 80's hardware had much less, except for having character modes, but I was specifically talking about ones using bitmap screens like the Amiga for example. But a blitter does not help you with the worst case scenario of filling the terminal with text from scratch as the setup cost is typically higher than the cost of having the CPU render individual characters (it certainly was on the Amiga - the blitter helped when moving larger chunks of data, but not for character sized areas). I have written terminals for 1980s hardware and for modern hardware. I know where the bottlenecks are and there is no issue whatsoever keeping up with the graphical display. When a terminal is slow it's a design issue.