Two Truths of Hardware

I would have to say my track-record at predicting hardware developments in the sim world has been pretty poor. But these two factors seem like they won't change for a bit:

1. The amount of working data a system can crank through in one frame keeps increasing while the total amount of virtual address space stays the same (3 GB).
2. The gap between the fastest and slowest systems from a finite time period keeps widening.

To elaborate on this first point, as video cards get faster (both GPU and internal bus/RAM speeds), system RAM and buses get faster (graphics slot changes are rare, but with enough VRAM this is relatively moot) the amount of texture and geometry data that X-Plane can tell the card to draw in a 30th of a second keeps going up. So users are running with more trees, roads, 3-d, etc. than in the past.

But all of this stuff lives in memory, and even if a user has 8 GB, X-Plane can't load more than 3. Imagine what will happen when a graphics card can draw 3 GB of data in one frame? X-Plane will have to use all of its available memory for things you see right now or it will waste graphics power. This would mean purging from memory anything that isn't on screen!

On the second point, video card power doubles every, um, six to twelve months (perhaps more like 18, now that the card makers are hitting the same fabrication and power limits that the CPU makers have already hit, but this is all seat of my pants). So even if we only supported the last three generations of cards (we support at least seven!!) that gap in performance doubles!

This means that every year it requires a more flexible rendering engine to make a sim with decent frame-rates for old computers and up-to-date graphics on new ones.