alt Hacker NewsA single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.
Replies
beagle3 • yesterday at 8:31 PM
The Amiga 500 had high res graphics (or high color graphics … but not on the same scanline), multitasking, 15 bit sound (with a lot of work - the hardware had 4 channels of 8 bit DACs but a 6-bit volume, so …)
In 1985, and with 512K of RAM. It was very usable for work.
➕ show 1 reply
bobmcnamara • yesterday at 4:58 PM
It's so much fun working with systems with more pixels than ram though. Manually interleaving interrupts. What joy.
echoangle • yesterday at 3:40 PM
Do you really need the framebuffer in RAM? Wouldn't that be entirely in the GPU RAM?
➕ show 6 replies
ohhellnawman • yesterday at 3:44 PM
[dead]
I had a 386 PC with 4MB of RAM when I was a kid, and it ran Windows 3.1 with a GUI, but that also had a VGA display at 640x480, and only 16-bit color (4 bits per pixel). So 153,600 bytes for the frame buffer.