Comment by bee_rider
3 years ago
OTOH I recall alt-tabbing full screen games (Warcraft 3 on a single core machine is a specific memory) and then sitting back for a while…
Office suites have never been good, but office suites in like 2005 seemed to stretch systems to the breaking point.
Lots of consumer software has always sucked out of the box, I guess if you are here you were possibly a technically savvy kid at some point, is it possible that you were just more selective about the types of programs you ran when you were using the computer for fun?
Most games don't need to change screen resolutions anymore which is the expensive bit since not only do you have to wait for the hardware to settle, you have to throw out basically everything in GPU memory and reset it all
Also, having to throw out basically everything in GPU memory is largely a thing of the past in the first place.
I still have this instinctual reluctance to change screen resolution in a game's setting screen, even though 99% of the time it's an instantaneous thing these days.
Modern games typically don't change the screen resolution at all. If there is a resolution setting then it usually is just for the internal render resolution and the final pass will scale that up to the native resolution of the display. Changing the screen resolution only made sense with CRTs where the display is actually capable of different resolutions unlike LCD displays where there is only one native resolution and non-native resolution needs to be resampled (either by the display, the GPU or the game).
> you have to throw out basically everything in GPU memory and reset it all
This is not an inherent limitation of CPUs but a part of Windows' exclusive fullscreen concept. Just another thing that was simply accepted as the way things are instead of being improved (until exclusive fullscreen went out of style).
Full-screen games were a specific issue because they would have full control of the graphics card (GPU multitasking hadn't been invented yet or something). When the game gets focus it has to set up the GPU from scratch.
Back then you ran games in proper fullscreen mode, whereas nowadays you run them in windowed mode (even when it's called fullscreen windowed).
If you get bad performance in a game nowadays it's a good idea to try proper fullscreen. Alt tabbing might be slow, but the game will run better.
Old text word processors on my 286/386 back in the late 80s / early 90s, ran just fine. Instant everything. Only thing that was truly slow was the scanner.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS has entered the chat.
I have fond memories of that, but basically the editor was a UI into a linked list with a blue screen. So not comparable to what people are being asked to do with Word and 365 today.
My personal beef with Word is that it struggles so much with long documents. Trying to read, say, a 300 page spec from 3GPP is miserable.