It makes me wish more graphics programmers would jump over to application development - 16.7ms is a huge amount of time for them, and 60 frames per second is such a low target. 144 or bust.

I don't think graphics devs changing over would change much. They would probably not lament over 16ms, but they would quickly learn that performance does not matter much in application development, and start building their own abstraction layer cake.

It's not even that performance is unimportant in absolute terms, but rather that the general state of software is so abysmal that performance is the least of your problems as a user, so you're not going to get excited over it.

No need for graphics programmers, anyone that is still around coding since the old days, does remember on how to make use of data structures, algorithms, and how to do much with little hardware resources.

Maybe the RAM prices will help bringing those skills back.

It's mostly on the business side. If business doesn't care then developers have no choice. Ofc the customers need to care too, looks like we don't care either...in general.

And embedded too. But then again, they do what they do precisely because in that environment those skills are appreciated, and elsewhere they are not.

That wouldn't make any difference. Graphics programmers spend a lot of effort on performance because spending a lot of $$$$ (time) can make an improvement that people care about. For most applications nobody cares enough about speed to pay the $$$ needed to make it fast.

Many application programmers could make things faster - but their boss says good enough, ship it, move to a new feature that is worth far more to me.