"It all started because I had this feeling that some old computers feel much more responsive than modern machines."
s/modern/recent/
"For example, an iMac G4 running macOS 9 or an Apple 2 both feel quicker than my 4.2 GHz Kaby Lake system."
Kaby Lake system running OSX? I have one of the last G4 that came with OS9. Based on intuition it would make audio applications "feel" slower, when OSX came out I did not "upgrade", despite the marketing at the time. I guess I am not the only one.
"It turns out the machines that feel quick are actually quick, much quicker than my modern computer - computers from the 70s and 80s commonly have keypress-to-screen-update latencies in the 30ms to 50ms range out of the box, whereas modern computers are usually in the 100ms to 200ms range."
"... where we are today, where can buy a system with the CPU that gives you the fastest single-threaded performance money can buy and get 6x the latency of a machine from the 70s."
Methinks when someone spends that kind of money on a system, they will never accept findings like these. They are not likely to respond "inquisitively" to someone who describes achieving better speeds with a "less powerful" system that costs a fraction of what they paid. More likely, they will try to discredit them.
I suspect the culprit is not the hardware, but the software.
Back in the day there were very little between the keyboard and the screen, and most of it were either in rom or in ram.
Never mind that unless one were dealing with a big iron or similar, multi-tasking was a big nope.
These days most OSs have 10s to 100s of processes going right after a first boot on a clean install. And all those can trip something at "random" intervals.
Just the other day I replied to a Reddit thread, and told a gamer who experienced periodic frame drops in CS:GO to check the other system processes. He protested that he had nothing else running, but elsewhere in the thread a Task Manager screenshot revealed that Windows 10 Smartscreen Filter was chewing through files and bottlenecking the HDD(a problem I've also experienced).
Basically, desktop Windows has crossed the threshold of "needs SSD" to perform adequately. And in theory that shouldn't impact the performance of an older game, but it does, because what happens next is that the scheduler misallocates process time and throws off everything.
More like desktops in general, and smartphones as well even after the decade long reboot, are running out of actual new stuff to cram in there (in a sense the desktop, bar some security issues, was done with Windows 95).
Thus desktop developers keep adding questionable "quality of life" stuff like file system indexers to justify their continued version releases (never mind avoiding doing actual code maintenance).
Strike that. Obviously computers were far more expensive in decades past and the prices have come down dramatically. What I meant is a first user with an older computer who is achieving better performance, e.g. lower latency, than a second user having the costs of acquiring the latest hardware and software (who discarded her older computers).
s/modern/recent/
"For example, an iMac G4 running macOS 9 or an Apple 2 both feel quicker than my 4.2 GHz Kaby Lake system."
Kaby Lake system running OSX? I have one of the last G4 that came with OS9. Based on intuition it would make audio applications "feel" slower, when OSX came out I did not "upgrade", despite the marketing at the time. I guess I am not the only one.
"It turns out the machines that feel quick are actually quick, much quicker than my modern computer - computers from the 70s and 80s commonly have keypress-to-screen-update latencies in the 30ms to 50ms range out of the box, whereas modern computers are usually in the 100ms to 200ms range."
"... where we are today, where can buy a system with the CPU that gives you the fastest single-threaded performance money can buy and get 6x the latency of a machine from the 70s."
Methinks when someone spends that kind of money on a system, they will never accept findings like these. They are not likely to respond "inquisitively" to someone who describes achieving better speeds with a "less powerful" system that costs a fraction of what they paid. More likely, they will try to discredit them.