Related rant to OP: compute power is so ubiquitously affordable nowadays that there is no excuse for apps to be slow even on these cheapest new devices.
I recently made a 3D game in my custom engine for the Ludum Dare 51 game jam[0] and I was shocked to see it run at a solid 50fps on a $118 IdeaPad 3[1].
50fps means every _20ms_ the game does at least:
- builds an oct-tree and auxiliary data structures for 1000+ physics objects, traverse this to find collisions, solve all physics constraints, compute new transform matrices for each obj.
- serialize and upload each object, view, and scene data to the igpu (no dedicated gpu)
- do vertex transformations on ~25k vertices + rasterize 30k triangles TWICE: once for the main camera, once for the shadow camera; rendering to 5 textures/gbuffers
- run two post processing passes over 1,049,088 pixels, doing outline + concavity detection, vignette, and gamma correction (18 texture samples per pixel).
- all the game logic including: reading inputs, character controller, firing cannons, updating projectiles, splintering meshes, updating game state, audio, UI, custom ECS query engine, etc.
The whole payload, unminified code + 3D assets + sound + textures, is 1.2mb over the wire. This is an engine I built over the last ~year in javascript(!), so it's not had nearly as much optimization as Unity etc.
And yet every day I encounter websites and apps that fail to be responsive to even basic button clicks. There's no excuse for this.
[0] https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/darkstar-sailor
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087YW8FQB/ref=ppx_od_dt_b...