You can definitely come up with ideas that are too early for the hardware. When I was doing proof of correctness work in the early 1980s, it took 45 minutes to run something that now runs in a second. I had a nice ragdoll physics system in the late 1990s, and on a 100 MIPS machine it was about a quarter of real time speed. Now games have ragdolls. Around 1970, I was working on 3D graphics with hidden surface elimination. I had it working, but I had to monopolize a million dollar UNIVAC mainframe in the middle of the night to do it at 2 FPS. Usually I just ran batch jobs and used a pen plotter. Asked to figure out a way to create drawings of parts from tool paths, I thought of what are now called octrees, figured out how memory would be needed, knew I had 64K of 36 bit words, and abandoned that approach. At a million dollars a megabyte, it was unaffordable. TCP was at one time considered too much compute for PC-sized machines. This produced a decade of now-forgotten "PC LAN" systems.

Some ideas just need a big engine.