StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.

A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you'd expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don't just have 'colour textures', they're likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that's another three times. The voice acting isn't likely to be in a single language any more either, so there'll be several copies of all the sound files.

A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. 'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!

I do agree with you. I can't think of a single useful feature that's been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it's worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.

[–] Teepo@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Why are you comparing the most common screen resolution in 2007 to a 4k monitor today? 4k isn't the most common today. This isn't a fair comparison.

[–] protogen420@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

1080p is still the most common, though is 1440p is catching up very fast

[–] nykula@piefed.social 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

BTW the demand for bigger screens and bigger resolutions is something I don't easily understand. I notice some difference between 1366x768 and 1920x1080 on a desktop, but the difference from further increase is of so little use for me I'd classify it as a form of bloat. If anything, I now habitually switch to downloading 480p and 720p instead of higher definition by default because it saves me traffic and battery power, and fits much more on a single disk easy to back up.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Pixel density is more important than resolution. Higher resolution is only useful outside of design work if the screen size matches

IMO the ideal resolutions for computer monitors is 24" @ 1080p, 27" @ 2k, and 32"+ at 4k+. For TV it's heavily dependant on viewer distance. I can't tell the difference between 2k and 4k on my 55" TV from the couch.

[–] protogen420@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago

the main thing I noticed with a 768p monitor was gnome being unusable thanks to their poor ui density

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!

Not at all. For example, Rimworld saves all the map and world data in one big XML (which is bad btw, don't do that): about 2 million lines @75 MB, for a 30-pawns mid-game colony.

So you see, Data is not what uses space. But what uses space instead is, if you don't properly re-use objects/textures (so called "assets"), or even copy and repack the same assets per level/map, because that saves dev time.

Ark Survival Evolved, with "only" about 100 GB requirement, was known as a unoptimized mess back then.

Witcher 3 mod "HD Reworked Next-Gen" has barely 20 GB with 4k textures and high-res meshes. And you can't say that Witcher 3 is not a vibrant and big open world game.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Excel is sooo much than it used to be in Office 97. And it's way better than any other spreadsheet software I've tried.

Speaking of, anyone know of any alternative that handles named tables the same as Excel? Built-in filtering/sorting and formulas that can address the table itself instead of a cell range?? Please?

[–] msage@programming.dev 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

SQL?

[–] RamRabbit@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Seriously. If you are talking about querying tables, Excel is the wrong tool to use. You need to be looking at SQL.

[–] GrapheneOSRuinedMyPixel@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've been hosting grist for a while and it is quite nice. Wasn't able to move all the stuff from classic spreadsheets though

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I'll check that out, thanks!