Which advance faster: Software or Hardware???

[hendu]

I too had Windows in mind when I posted my first post, but managed to restrain myself from mentioning it

Even if you consider contemporary hardware, ie win3 on 486, xp on p4 and so on, every newer one boots slower and does the same things slower. Even with the hardware increases. If this is still not a regression in your eyes, I don't know what is.

In my eyes, even regressing on the same hw counts.

It is relatively easy to think of a new hardware, putting it into work is the hard part, and thus, Software has to be always behind the hardware development.

Cases against that: software has a need, hardware is made to fill that need. DSPs, AES-NI, even AMD64.

[aanderse]

Given currently available technology, we should have cars that drive us around in absolute safety, leaving us to lounge in the back and sip champagne.

We have all the hardware to do this — the video cameras, motion sensors and high powered computers — and we’ve had this technology for decades. So why don’t cars drive themselves? The answer is that we don’t have the software.

http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407

There is a free ebook available on this website about this topic.
I haven't actually read the ebook yesterday as I just recently was linked to it, but the premise is interesting so I plan on reading it.

I didn't vote, I just posted this link because I recently saw it and it seemed quite relevant to the topic
I hope someone finds the link I provided of some interest.

[Radikalizm]

Google has developed cars which can manage to drive themselves in very complex traffic situations, so I'd say we do have the software for that, but I get the point of your quote

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0I5DHOETFE

EDIT:

This video gives more of a 'HOLY SH*T-feeling'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9Fxp3HK6DI

[Eigen]

As hardware gets better and more capable, programmers get sloppier because there are no real performance issues to be tackled. Sure, methods for code/project organization/management are being improved on and researched, but the quality of code, I believe, suffers in quality.

[Radikalizm]

As hardware gets better and more capable, programmers get sloppier because there are no real performance issues to be tackled. Sure, methods for code/project organization/management are being improved on and researched, but the quality of code, I believe, suffers in quality.

More capable hardware however allows for cleaner coding styles. If you have ever done any low-level programming for 'older' (and even some current) hardware you'll see that you will have to resort to some rather dirty hacks to get things to run the way you want.
A good example of this is video mode switching; to do this in a protected mode environment on an x86 CPU you'll have to resort to writing a full-blown video driver, which is kind of overkill if you only need to set a video mode (not to mention that implementations differ depending on your graphics card vendor), while you are able to switch video modes with relative ease in a real mode environment by using BIOS calls
Making the switch to real mode from protected mode is a rather dirty hack, and it has been this way throughout the entire lifespan of the x86 architecture and still exists to this day

This issue has not been solved yet, and I doubt it will be, but others have been solved by advancements in hardware leading to cleaner and more efficient coding styles.

If code is of a low quality it's entirely the programmers fault; there's no excuse for writing bad code, even if the hardware allows for less optimization

[Eigen]

If code is of a low quality it's entirely the programmers fault; there's no excuse for writing bad code, even if the hardware allows for less optimization

Agreed, there is no excuse, but I'm just saying it's inevitable that you become (or might become) less bothered with optimizations and such if there are no performance drawbacks. Also, provided you have plenty of system memory even memory leaks play no role unless they are huge to the level of megs per second. Of course, a good programmer will still keep the quality of code as high as possible no matter the hardware capabilities.

But I have a sneaky feeling a lot of today's games underneath are far from optimized because there simply isn't enough time or the need, because that pushes people to buy newer and better computers. When I mean optimized, I mean to the level of Quake 3 was, eg. the inverse square root function (or integer math instead of floating point) and the highly responsive input system which used some pretty neat tricks to break out of code as early as possible and so on. I doubt Crysis/Far Cry (or any other visually breathtaking game) shader files are/were perfectly optimal, they just work, but definitely there are some tweaks to be done to make it go even faster and push the hardware requirements lower.