If you listen to people like Ray Kurzweil, and consider history you get the feeling that hardware will just get better and better at increasing speeds. (Exponential growth).

But well, if I look at pricing for a graphics card today, and compare to 2011, when I bought my last card, then I will now have to pay 4 times what I did back then to get 4x the performance for a modern card. IF even that! This puzzles me. And fact is my card still works reasonably well for a new game like "Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor" for instance. Well enough, that I have no problems playing it.

If advancements in technology followed a 11 month cycle for halving prices, like RK. speaks about, then I should now get a 16 times more powerful card for the same price I payed back then. And if I consider the hardware I had 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago... I do not get the feeling that they have advanced anywhere near as much as you would expect. For sure, GDI is much faster now, and also we use lots more pixels now. So for sure, something has happend. But I just feel it should be much more.

Today, if I lower my resolution to 800x600 which was common in the old days, I can get as much as 700++ frames per sec for GDI. When just doing the Weirdcolorpatternfill from the Handmade series. That's pretty cool, and maybe people dont notice it cause they use much higher resolution now. A HD resolution (1920x1080) is 8+megs, while 800*600 will be just 1/4 of that. For HD I get around 200frames then as you would expect for that particular code.

What do you think about this? And what kind of performance increase do you expect in 2 years, 4 years or 10 years time?