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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

One of my pet peeves is that graphics programming does not generally enjoy this level of rigor like audio does, despite arguably being also real-time. This is doubly true for UI programming, I'm not aware of any UI toolkits designed with real-time in mind.

I would love to see a UI system that has predictable low-latency real-time perf, so you could confidently achieve something like single frame latency on 144Hz display.

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On the other hand, the throughput requirements on image processing are often far more stringent than in audio. A full-resolution stereo audio stream is only 200kb/s = 12 Mb/min after all, whereas a video system might have to chew throw many gigabytes in the same time.

Well, if you allow a bit of a sloppy terminology, graphics are “softer” real-time, than audio - a frame drop is less noticeable than audio glitches.

That's where realtime and fast differ : you can consider there's a "hard"-er real-time at 100ms by example, where you can drop some frames but you don't want to block the ui. Be slow but don't block the UI.

When I last made a similar point someone pointed out to me that this has gained a higher priority recently thanks to VR. Janky framerate is going to be much more noticeable with a headset than with a traditional monitor, and could even result in lost lunches!

The tiniest audio glitch is instantly noticed and extremely annoying. So extreme efforts are put into preventing them. If your software has audio glitches people will really stop using it.

A graphics micro-stutter not so much.

> I'm not aware of any UI toolkits designed with real-time in mind.

What would be the point? The human eye can only notice so much FPS (gamers might disagree with their 244 FPS displays).

Not just annoying, but potentially dangerous. An audio glitch could concievably deafen 2 thousand people at a show if things go wrong.

All games seem to manage this somehow. Usually by using fixed layout for the UI, because re-layout is a nasty non parallelizeable problem that UI designers frequently inflict on themselves.

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