smeezekitty wrote:

Actually that is exactly what the general population does.

[citation needed] 😉 nah jk

I am quite aware of the reasoning why CGI looks "fake" but consider this forum is based
on running old games with even more primitive graphics. Many people do not require stunning
visuals to remain entertained

The benefits of such simulations go far beyond entertainment. One cool example of the usefulness of massively parallel computing is real-time fluid simulation. 😀

Well enough but you have to wait it out because we are not there yet. Remember this is a vintage hardware section of the forum

Yes, that's my point. 😀 The progress can be as much fun as the result, so why not keep it coming?!
And pardon me as I was posting from "active topics" and didn't really notice the section. I thought this fits more into Milliways.

And if you said you could stay with a Pentium MMX, please, please, don't watch high-res digital videos ever again for the rest of your life. The good news is that you can still watch regular 35mm and 70mm IMAX films (edited by hand using scissors and tape of course) which would still be awesome regardless.

Off topic nonsense. First of all I don't have HD TV service (don't care - not much worth watching anyway)
and the only HD video I watch is ocassional HD videos on youtube. I'm perfectly okay with 640x480 of whatever

I did imply a reasoning behind that example (and I wasn't even the first to bring up HD video here). Those videos we see everyday don't just come from nowhere--and digital video editing needs serious resource.

What I'm trying to say was, the ease offered by more powerful computers has tremendous/compounding effects upon our daily life even if we don't use them directly. please expand your (no one specific here, no need to take it personally) perspective from just (mainly) consumption to also encompass the production/creation aspect of computing technology.

And don't forget if *somehow* (remember its theoretical anyway) CPUs got stuck at Pentium MMX,
someone would develop a wickedly optimized video decoder to play higher resolution video.
Just like trixter played 40x25 video on an 8088. I am quite sure 1280x720 is achievable on a PMMX

We used to have MPEG-2 decoder hardware back in... starting from 1997/1998 I guess? So yes, it's not that far off. But IMO, to cover the true usable resolution of cine (Super)35mm film we'll need, at the very least, between 2K and 4K (again this is from the production vantage point). There's also the issue of color depth and dynamic range of course. There are other important factors beside encoding/decoding efficiency, storage/media throughput for example. But that's also part of the technological progress. Oh, and as you can imagine, video-streaming sites significantly benefit from faster better systems too.

Sorry if I came on a little strong but this is about vintage games and vintage computers
yet you come in here blasting people for liking old tech.

No, I wasn't "blasting people". Just exercising my opinion in an open, public, sort of intellectual discussion. Again, no need to take anything personally. I'm a participant here too who likes some of the older tech. When I said "This is silly", I was referring to the wording of the topic subject. Perhaps I should've made that clearer in the first place.

tl;dr point: technology is an eternal progress.

fyy wrote:

King_Corduroy wrote:

Yeah he's right, on my Compaq I put in an AMD FirePro card and I could watch HD movies, run minecraft (very slowly) and almost use Cinnamon without any delay time. 🤣

Try Crunchbang, it's a Debian based Linux distro with a tiny footprint and minimalist desktop using OpenBox. Blazing fast and I bet your Compaq would love it. Here's a pic of it installed onto my laptop:

http://oi61.tinypic.com/2h7nf3q.jpg

I second this. Crunchbang is an amazing distro for low-end hardware. The UI takes some getting used to however.

archsan wrote:

And if you said you could stay with a Pentium MMX, please, please, don't watch high-res digital videos ever again for the rest of your life. The good news is that you can still watch regular 35mm and 70mm IMAX films (edited by hand using scissors and tape of course) which would still be awesome regardless.

You do realize that DI and such have existed since the 1970s, and computer supported effects and editing have been done regularly since at least the 1980s, right? Movies like Super Mario Bros, Jurassic Park, etc were created without the advent of even Pentium MMX, and various animated movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s are solid examples of DI and full digital restoration/animation in action. There's also even older movies and television productions like Star Trek: TNG, The Black Hole, Star Wars, Moonraker, and so forth that have some absolutely fantastic effects shots despite computers of the time being extremely limited.

As far as CG graphics - FF Spirits is at least partially pathtraced iirc, but very much falls into the uncanny valley as an overall finished product. Modern PRman can do RT/GI.

^
Forgot Toy Story? 😉

My response to that would be a one-liner: That kind of CG quality is now much much more affordable to indie filmmakers (or even hobbyists).

Now of course CG is just one (optional) aspect to the craftsmanship of filmmaking & storytelling. But would you argue that it isn't more fun now compared to 15-20 years ago, if you were an animator, or say, if you were a young kid having the passion to become one?

archsan wrote:

^
Forgot Toy Story? 😉

Toy Story isn't photo-realistic, and also came out in 1995. But it did not use x86 CPUs for the actual rendering (which isn't uncommon for older movies). My point wasn't, however, computer power to generate a CG movie, but instead that you weren't confined to hand-editing in the 1980s and 1990s.

My response to that would be a one-liner: That kind of CG quality is now much much more affordable to indie filmmakers (or even hobbyists).

Actually it hasn't gotten any more or less affordable, it has just gotten faster and become more proliferated. Toy Story, FF Spirits, etc could all be rendered on a single machine or small hobby cluster (they were both rendered on COTS hardware), it would just take ages and ages. FF Spirits was done on a farm of 960 Pentium 3 933s, and they averaged 90 minutes per frame (roughly 141,964 frames). So as a hobbyist if you only had 96 P3s it'd take you ten times longer, but it would still be possible to render.

This doesn't even address things like voice over, editing, motion capture, etc which is still complex and expensive beyond just rendering the movie. I'm not aware of any indie/hobbyist film that has approached Pixar, Square, or Imageworks quality - while there are certainly indie live action or drawn productions that can approach or rival "big budget" live action or drawn productions.

Now of course CG is just one (optional) aspect to the craftsmanship of filmmaking & storytelling. But would you argue that it isn't more fun now compared to 15-20 years ago, if you were an animator, or say, if you were a young kid having the passion to become one?

Yes and no. So much stuff in movies today is done as CG because it's a quick and dirty alternative to animatronics, make up effects, puppets, or other forms of practical effects. And honestly I feel like it's a "cheap" effect in many situations. I think there's a lot to be said for practical effects - great example of this is to look at The Black Hole; as far as I know it hasn't had any CGI witchery done to it (like Star Wars has) and yet it still "holds up" today, because most of the fantastical objects (robots, ships, etc) that they interact with are actually tangible objects - sure they may not be full-scale, but trick photography takes care of that detail. Compare that to movies in the late 1990s that use cheap CG - it just looks phony and bad nowadays. 😵

As far as animation goes - there's A LOT to be said for hand-drawn animation imho, especially compared to doing it quick and dirty in Flash or Java.

I'm not trying to argue against progress or technology here, just stating that filmmaking did quite a lot without CGI for many many years, and that CGI isn't always salvation for a movie. The only "advances" I've seen CGI providing for movies is creating a new sub-genre of animated movies (and that's where Toy Story fits in), and those few films that try to push the envelope with effects (like The Matrix).

My point wasn't, however, computer power to generate a CG movie, but instead that you weren't confined to hand-editing in the 1980s and 1990s.

Hmm, with that 35mm/70mm film comment I actually wasn't even originally talking about CGI effects, just plain video/motion picture. It was more about how many of today's videos/films being edited on digital NLE workstations instead of the traditional cutting room (yes, those fancy classic special effects films/shows would still have to be edited in cutting rooms, right). Mainstream "proliferation", using your word.

re: CPU render farms. Please see GPGPU-based rendering. Today's GPUs are vastly more fitted to such massively parallel task than even today's multicore x86 CPUs (not to say the 90's!). Appreciate your calculations though, now will you consider approximating the render time using today's most powerful GPUs? 😀

This doesn't even address things like voice over, editing, motion capture, etc which is still complex and expensive beyond just rendering the movie. I'm not aware of any indie/hobbyist film that has approached Pixar, Square, or Imageworks quality

Yes, I didn't mean the whole production value either, since that would be largely offtopic here -- just the CG/CGI aspect. Or the potential of it, if you will.

Not exactly a groundbreaking film in any way, but Iron Sky was an indie production. For hobbyists, well hence I said quality, not quantity, though the two are related. Think a much smaller scale here -- short duration projects, not full feature films.

- while there are certainly indie live action or drawn productions that can approach or rival "big budget" live action or drawn productions.

Uhuh. And properly-rigged modern DSLRs + MBPs (don't forget the SSDs -- crucial for live editing) + FCP would help tremendously in such budget production, amirite? Or you'd rather have them rent awfully expensive cine gears and burn precious reels (+ other film-related costs)? I like EOSHD and PB for following this kind of tech advances (esp. for those outside the big studios). In short: even for plain traditional motion picture, the premium technical quality isn't limited to the big-budget studios anymore, thanks to the advances in digital imaging tech. So what's happening more and more today with these young indie geniuses, is that you can have both artistic and technical quality right up there from the get go.

As to your comments about "cheap" use of CG/CGI in today's movies, yes I feel the same. 😀 They're often distracting or simply downright off-putting. Nothing replaces good writing, good directing and good acting (in short, good human resources!). I'll go even further: CGI is never the salvation for a movie in any way.

archsan wrote:

CGI is never the salvation for a movie in any way

And that's the reason why I abandoned mainstream entertainment in the mid-1990's, I could see where it was going and just gave up. Computing in general (and retro-computing in particular) is my entertainment now, along with watching pre-1990's movies and TV series once in a while.

Yeah I agree, all this modern CGI is tasteless and directors lean too heavily on the visual rather than story aspects of movies these days. There are VERY few movies post CGI that I consider worth watching.

Back to the original topic (or close to it) I have often asked myself this question a lot.

A 386DX33 running Windows 3.1 would run earlier versions of most of the software I use today. It certainly would not run it at blazing speeds, but it would run it.

I'd say the first processors that made a lot of tasks actually made it run at reasonable speeds would be a Pentium MMX in the 166-233 MHz range.

Seems like from that point on you are doing the same basic things, only faster.

Until you start getting into the "modern software" era that requires 4x the hardware to do the same thing

After a fair bit of experimentation, the lowest I can find tolerable in todays modern world of internet, is a Pentium 4 1.8A, 1.5 gbyte RAM, win XP, TNT2 pro 32 meg, gotta by firefox tho, Chrome is intolerable at this level, it is however far more pleasant with a geforce 4MX. Also the VIA Esther 1.5 (C7D) is just about OK on 1 gbyte, but the S3 Unichrome pro is just a pain. Also can cope OK with a Sempron 2800+, 1 Gbyte ram and SIS 315e 64Mb card. so that is as slow as i would like to go over the 3 CPU makers of the era plus old GPU's. So all can browse, post, play UT,quake, NFS U2 at tolerable levels, even manage online video as long as you don't expect HD. wish me luck as these are the 3 PC's set up at home at the present! 🤣

BSA Starfire wrote:

After a fair bit of experimentation, the lowest I can find tolerable in todays modern world of internet, is a Pentium 4 1.8A, 1.5 gbyte RAM, win XP, TNT2 pro 32 meg, gotta by firefox tho, Chrome is intolerable at this level, it is however far more pleasant with a geforce 4MX. Also the VIA Esther 1.5 (C7D) is just about OK on 1 gbyte, but the S3 Unichrome pro is just a pain. Also can cope OK with a Sempron 2800+, 1 Gbyte ram and SIS 315e 64Mb card. so that is as slow as i would like to go over the 3 CPU makers of the era plus old GPU's. So all can browse, post, play UT,quake, NFS U2 at tolerable levels, even manage online video as long as you don't expect HD. wish me luck as these are the 3 PC's set up at home at the present! 🤣

Why not P3? A fast P3 will actually beat that P4

If we had to stay in a single generation, I'd say the further back we could go without mass chaos would be Pentium MMX era. PCs were powerful and user friendly enough so the average Joe could just put the CD of his "work software", install it through AutoRun and double click an icon in the desktop to start working. You also didn't need to set a bunch of parameters by hand on each software to get your printer working: you just installed the driver (which, once again, was a matter of putting the CD in and letting it do its thing) and magically contemporary software would know what to do. We even had USB so we already had the option of not messing around with a bunch of different ports.

And instead of skype people could use AIM :p . Hell, I STILL use winamp, one of the best software of all time IMO.

Hi,
being new on the forum, but a bit experienced with hardware (only PC), I´d use chipsets as time reverence: HX (for example ASUS P55T2P4) or BX (Abit BX133Raid - I´d love to have one of those!!)
Rock stable, and outstanding in their time.
greetings duncan

smeezekitty wrote:

BSA Starfire wrote:

After a fair bit of experimentation, the lowest I can find tolerable in todays modern world of internet, is a Pentium 4 1.8A, 1.5 gbyte RAM, win XP, TNT2 pro 32 meg, gotta by firefox tho, Chrome is intolerable at this level, it is however far more pleasant with a geforce 4MX. Also the VIA Esther 1.5 (C7D) is just about OK on 1 gbyte, but the S3 Unichrome pro is just a pain. Also can cope OK with a Sempron 2800+, 1 Gbyte ram and SIS 315e 64Mb card. so that is as slow as i would like to go over the 3 CPU makers of the era plus old GPU's. So all can browse, post, play UT,quake, NFS U2 at tolerable levels, even manage online video as long as you don't expect HD. wish me luck as these are the 3 PC's set up at home at the present! 🤣

Why not P3? A fast P3 will actually beat that P4

Yes, my PIII is probably as quick, but don't want to install XP on that one.

Can't say what the general public would tolerate, but for me? Agree with most of you:
- If things were to stay the same (especially the web), a Core 2 Duo. I can barely get by with a P4 (my secondary machine at home) with 2 GB RAM, but Youtube and full HD videos are a pain. That is with a video acceleration capable video card. I'm typing this on a C2D machine with 8 GB RAM and it's perfectly fine.
- If software was better optimized, especially the web (this coming from a web developer!), a P2 or P3 era machine would be plenty. If video cards with decent video decoding existed for it, perfect.
- If humanity had spent the last 20 years squeezing every last bit out of the hardware, a 486 or original Pentium with 16-32 MB of RAM could be plenty.

In terms of gaming, I'd consider a 1 GHz Pentium III or Athlon to be around the cutoff point for my tastes in CPU terms. Anything slower and Unreal Tournament performance will really tank beyond the "always 60 FPS" mark, which I'd rather avoid. Unreal Engine 1 wants as much CPU as it can get, really. Guess we can thank the lack of HT&L for that.

In terms of the modern Internet, though? As several have already mentioned, a Core 2-era CPU is kinda necessary for today's incredibly bloated and inefficient Web. A lot of that can be attributed to Adobe Flash outgrowing its initial scope as a tool for vector animation on the Web and nothing more; weren't Director/Shockwave meant for Web games anyway?

Funny thing is, if you look far back enough, you can find ancient Flash animations that suggest Pentium IIs or so for ideal performance. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT NOW!

All that said, my P4EE 3.2 GHz/2 GB/6800 Ultra retrogaming box is actually a surprisingly usable machine on today's Web. It's also likely to be the lowest I'd go for general use, because you'd be surprised how many things these days need SSE2, which my Athlon XP systems don't support.

And also with that said...I still wouldn't give up my Core i7-4770K box. This thing's ability to emulate older systems is pretty astounding.

snorg wrote:

This is such a difficult question to answer. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and was a young man in the 90s, so I remember how ama […]
Show full quote

This is such a difficult question to answer. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and was
a young man in the 90s, so I remember how amazing it was seeing something
like Doom or Quake for the first time. My answer probably depends on a
couple things: can I access the internet at speeds where it is useful, and can
I get software? If the answer is "yes" to both, then I would probably be happy
with a high-end 486 or maybe a P-Pro 200. That was right around the time I
could first start doing CG without it being painful.

If I have to wait a day for my OS or apps to load, and the internet is super
slow do to Flash/java/whatever, no thanks.

I'm in agreement with Snorg. P-Pro 180 / 200 or maybe the P166 if software would be available.

And that's the reason why I abandoned mainstream entertainment in the mid-1990's, I could see where it was going and just gave up. Computing in general (and retro-computing in particular) is my entertainment now, along with watching pre-1990's movies and TV series once in a while.

Couldn't agree more.

I think the slowest PC I could tolerate using is an 8088. You can get LOTS of stuff done with just text mode. But for multi media type stuff the lowest I could tolerate would be a 486 with a 72Hz 800x600 display.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

And that's the reason why I abandoned mainstream entertainment in the mid-1990's, I could see where it was going and just gave up. Computing in general (and retro-computing in particular) is my entertainment now, along with watching pre-1990's movies and TV series once in a while.

Couldn't agree more.

I think the slowest PC I could tolerate using is an 8088. You can get LOTS of stuff done with just text mode. But for multi media type stuff the lowest I could tolerate would be a 486 with a 72Hz 800x600 display.

😎

Sure beats those that can't tolerate anything slower than a Core2

With optimized software, you can go much lower even with fairly rich content.