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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

The games are not doing much OS interaction at all. That's where most of the delays come from (when it's not just poor internal architecture). The games do physics, logic and video rendering. They typically have a relatively direct path to the GPU, bypassing most of the kernel.

This is not a model for applications in general.

That doesn't mean that the sluggish desktop apps should not be fixed, but "be more like games" is not really the right advice.

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Games and Applications aren't that far apart, most titles will be developed on existing engines that are predisposed to certain genres/constraints and will need to work within that the same way that UI frameworks limit what possible things an application can do(which is quite a lot).

I've spent a decent amount of time in both spaces in my career, it is totally possible to build performant, fluid applications but it requires a degree of care and investment. Usually "good enough" suffices and that's where things land but there are also developers who prioritize that and short of very restrictive environments you can build responsive applications.

Besides, at the end of the day all UI is doing is rendering, with a direct path to the GPU just like games do :).

> They typically have a relatively direct path to the GPU

That makes me wonder... How much of an OS could be offloaded to a GPU? Specially for CPUs built into the processors that share the same memory bus, the data wouldn't need to go through PCIe to get to the GPU and back to main memory.

Does any modern OS offer a standard and architecture-neutral way to run workloads on GPUs?

> That doesn't mean that the sluggish desktop apps should not be fixed, but "be more like games" is not really the right advice.

If we can offload as much of the GUI rendering to the GPU, that's still a win because it frees the CPU for other things.

> The games are not doing much OS interaction at all. That's where most of the delays come from

...really? My PC is orders of magnitude more powerful than the 166Mhz Pentium PC my family used in the 90s, yet the interface is no faster. Was interacting with the OS somehow orders of magnitude faster back then? I can run Win98 in a virtual machine with all the associated overhead... hell, I can do that on top of f'ing javascript in a web browser, and it is still more responsive than modern OSs.

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