Without a doubt. I couldn't play any of the VR games I enjoy in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to edit the photos from my nice camera in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to videocall my family in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to reasonably decode and playback streaming HD video content with 16MB of RAM. The vast majority of the things I do with my computer I genuinely wouldn't be able to reasonably do in 16MB of RAM, so yeah, my computer is practically infinitely more useful. Not 1000x, not 10,000x, not 100,000,000,000x. Even more than that.
256 != 16MB. We're already 16x past the original claim, and it's still not as useful as my current machine.
And were those photos the same resolution and bit depth? Would you say the experience is really similar? Back when I had 256MB of RAM, editing even a couple megapixel photo from my Nikon Coolpix 2000 was usually pretty slow. There's no way it would reasonably process a 20MP photo and have an acceptable experience.
Still no VR gaming.
And yeah, sure, I did video calls at 256MB RAM. It was a pretty crappy experience, like 320x240 at like 10fps, nowhere near comparable to having multiple participants in HD and reasonable frame rates. I did maybe a handful of calls a month, now I have several calls a day. However, I never did video calls on a machine with 16MB of RAM.
The person I was replying to was talking about a 16MB desktop, not a 256MB desktop.
And like, yeah, if you scale back the expectations to the other stuff we had when desktops had 256MB of RAM on average, and you squint real hard, it kind of looks the same. But that 2MP photo isn't the same as a 20MP RAW, they're not really comparable. A laggy, pixelated, single video call really isn't the same as multi person HD calls. The expansion in features makes these things a lot more viable in actually using them day to day. Like, I didn't bother video calling many people because the experience in 256MB RAM was miserable. Now I do it all the time, because the experience is way better because our computers are just so much more powerful.
If the experience of doing it is so bad from it's limitations that you practically never use it, it's utility value is practically zero.
I repeat: the jump from 1989 to 1999 was mind blowing. From 2001 to 2021, resolution and 3D capabilities among bigger image and video sizes, but nothing revolutionary.
Even less from 2001 to 2011, save for mutiple core machines and 1280x720 machines everywhere.
A proper comparison would be having, in 2021, automatically fully walkable street view cities in 3D generated on the fly and not a clone of Cryo engines/stereographics 360 degree images which could be done back in the day with Flash Player and a Pentium MMX@233 and a 16MB accelerator. What today we are doing it's to enforce the requeriment to have at mininum a C2D and a GL 2.1 accelerator to properly run in JS something we could do in Pentium III at crazy speeds.
No, there's no proper improvement there, but trivial linear scaling. Nothing like Amiga OS 2.1 playing m68k games-> Pentium III PC's with Quake 3 Arena.
I repeat: the original comment was about a system with 16MB RAM total. You're then suggesting all that memory on just another accelerator card in addition to like 128MB+ of system memory.
I repeat: my original comment was about how useful a computer with 16MB total RAM would be compared to my needs today. And sure, at an extremely crappy near not useful level a PIII with a GeForce 256 and 256-512MB RAM can technically do most of the things on this list. I'd probably say to have the experience I'm really looking for, an experience that would actually have me use these things on a normal basis, I'd probably want closer to 512-1GB RAM. I didn't really like editing family photos until I had a 512MB system. And yeah, I'd agree it's a lot of incremental improvement since then. But that incremental improvement brought a lot of those features from a "do this rarely" to "do this several times a day, nearly every day".
But still, this ignores the original comment. I repeat: they were talking about a 16MB system. Not a 256MB system. Especially not something with 16MB on an accelerator card alone. You'd agree the experience you're talking about just isn't practically available on a 16MB system?
Without a doubt. I couldn't play any of the VR games I enjoy in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to edit the photos from my nice camera in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to videocall my family in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to reasonably decode and playback streaming HD video content with 16MB of RAM. The vast majority of the things I do with my computer I genuinely wouldn't be able to reasonably do in 16MB of RAM, so yeah, my computer is practically infinitely more useful. Not 1000x, not 10,000x, not 100,000,000,000x. Even more than that.