Comment by Klathmon
7 years ago
Exactly! It's like saying today that 64gb of ram should be enough for just about everyone in their personal machine.
In 10 years, that might be a hilariously small number, but for right now, it's way more than the extreme vast majority will need.
There is a limit though. By the time you get to the point where you can store more high-definition movies than you can possibly watch in a lifetime you have definitely passed the point of diminishing returns. And with non-volatile storage, we're pretty much already there.
Until a new format comes out which requires magnitudes more storage?
I can already imagine vr-style videos pushing 8k with huge dynamic range and very high framerates becoming more common if the technology continues to go that direction, and suddenly a full video export in the highest quality becomes a magnitude (or 2!) jump larger.
As videogames become higher resolutions, they require higher res textures, and less compressed audio, and more detailed models. Not just like 50% more detailed, but 10x more detailed.
Sure, we are beyond the point now where it's pretty easy for the average person to store all information they ever could need on spinning disks for pretty cheap, but once that next "thing" comes out that requires a magnitude more, we are right back to looking silly for thinking 5tb should be enough for anyone!
> Until a new format comes out which requires magnitudes more storage?
No, even that has a limit. We're getting to the point where humans will be unable to perceive additional improvements in resolution. It's no different from audio. CDs are unchanged from when they were introduced 36 years ago because humans cannot hear the difference between a CD and "higher-qualitY" audio. There is a point where that will happen for video: when you can fill the entire field of view of the human eye with video the same resolution as your fovea at ~100FPS, that's it. There is no more room for improvement.
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Storage doesn't really have diminishing returns unfortunately when it comes to fidelity.
Fidelity has diminishing returns though.