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Comment by anon1385 | Hacker News Reader

>Am I missing something?

No not really. Just web developers being excited that the lords and masters who control their s̶h̶a̶c̶k̶l̶e̶s̶ sandbox have dropped them a few crumbs allowing them to compete with the native software of 1996.

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1996 was pre-GeForce256. Your timeline is off.

No way in hell you could do this realtime in 1996, native or not.

There are some impressive demos from the late 90's. For example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUm8_b8fIuU

Demos are not typical and in no way demonstrate the general usage of a GPU. They use very dirty tricks to render out a specific output, and are practically useless otherwise.

Here's a list of actual software that was released in 1996:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_in_video_gaming

Notable entries for this conversation:

* Duke Nukem 3D * Civilization II * Quake * Command & Conquer: Red Alert * Diablo * Quake

These were good games, but not necessarily what anyone would consider graphical powerhouses with a modern frame of reference.

In addition to my sibling, we have no idea if those demo's are realtime. While we can see that the OP is realtime.

Compare a pixar film to your average AAA video game, hour(s) of rendering time vs millisecond(s).

They're real time, that's the whole point of demos.

i think you're flipping the script here: the web isn't "shackled", it's a virtual machine that almost everyone and their grandmother has chosen to install. tell me how one could, in 1996, get any computer made in the last two or four years to run this software at this quality in under 3 seconds? virtual machines are slower in exchange for their universality, and we're now at the point where they're fast enough to do awesome things.

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