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Yeah, this is the weirdest thing to me: Windows NT 3.51 on a Pentium was much snappier perceptibly than even my new M1 MBP (developers are already expanding to the new performance envelope).



Dan Luu has done some measurements around this:

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

https://danluu.com/term-latency/


Similarly, SNES games were more responsive than modern games and have zero loading screens.


And didn’t render millions of polygons at 60+ fps, while having many GBs of assets like textures, so I don’t see how is it relevant.

One could write those programs in a truly inefficient manner in a not too performant language and it would run without problem. Today’s computers are really fast.


The problem is that, instead of the speed of modern computers translating to perceptible performance improvements for normal users, it translates to applications that use more resources.

Whether or not the new features make up for the general perceptual slowness of modern computers is a somewhat open question.


I would agree with you, but in terms of games it is simply not a great example. It may be questionable why would we want photorealistic games when 2D, visible pixels are good enough, but games are not known for being inefficient.


Yet many of the games were more entertaining than many games today.


That’s completely orthogonal.


Windows Server 2019 has a much snappier UI then Windows 10 I've found (I recently spent a ton of time automating installs for both and boy did that become noticeable).

Then you look at the Windows 10 list of crapware and it becomes a lot clearer.


Windows 10 is an abomination.

It’s incredible how much grief Windows Vista got in comparison.


Vista was a worse abomination on 2 GB of RAM. It's likely that if I installed a build of Windows 10 from 2 years ago on the machine in question, it would be faster than a greased lightning in comparison.


Then you look at the Windows 10 list of crapware and it becomes a lot clearer.

Is there an actual causal relationship? And which crapware specifically? Asking because I only have access to a bunch of Windows 10 Pro machines which already don't seem to have most of crapware on there (i.e. often I see threads here where people complain about all kinds of ads and other things I never even knew existed) and the rest disabled (as far as I can tell) and still it's less snapy than this one Windows Server instance on comparable machine. (and sadly no single modern OS feels as snappy as even Windows XP SP2 for a similar level of functionality on not-so-recent hardware)


The difference is the list of running background services. Kernel and drivers are the same, libraries are the same, but server doesn't have (ex) the AllJoyn Router Service for Smart Things Control, the 4G LTE Push Notifications Service, the WAP Push Message Service, the Fax Service, Windows Image Acquisition, and so on. Candy Crush doesn't run on startup, these do.




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