Comment by squidmaster
3 days ago
How is it not software rendering? These games shipped without hardware renderers. Yes, they also don't have AA, but how does that make it not software rendering?
3 days ago
How is it not software rendering? These games shipped without hardware renderers. Yes, they also don't have AA, but how does that make it not software rendering?
Here’s an analogy. Suppose someone said, “I love manual transmission cars” and then described in detail the physical knobs and dials that all the cars from the 1950s had.
It turns out what they like is physical knobs and dials. You can have those in automatic transmission cars. It so happens that most modern automatics also have shitty touchscreens.
(I know this analogy isn’t precise because there was a long period of automatics with physical controls, but bear with me.)
The point is that there’s nothing _inherent_ to software rendering that’s responsible for the thing he likes. The distinction is useful because, for example, he could go seek out modern games with the look he likes. Or make games. And if he thought the thing he likes comes from having a software renderer, he’d leave a lot of performance and power efficiency on the table for no good reason. He likes a certain rendering style that’s equally achievable with both GPU and CPU rendering. The choice of hardware should probably be driven by considerations like performance, debuggability, platform support, availability of libraries, etc.
Ah, I see. Maybe: somebody says they love audio cassette players, and start talking about the super tactile mechanical buttons and switches that go chunk in a satisfying way. You could rightly object that that you can put buttons like that on an mp3 player. But it's a historical fact that these things are actually linked, in a way that's meaningful to people, namely in their personal nostalgic experiences.
> But it's a historical fact that these things are actually linked
You might think that if you didn't know about the breadth of cassette players, but you'd be wrong on the technical merits, because cassette players existed that did not have those buttons (and also those buttons predate cassette players).
Describing your love of a certain kind of button as a love of things that play cassettes is a misattribution. If you had said "I like the audio cassette players that have those kinds of buttons because those buttons are amazing" you'd have hit the truth encased in the trappings of your nostalgia.
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The point is that the thing that OP likes has nothing to do with whether something is rendered in software or hardware.
"Nothing to do" is a bit strong. It has something to do, and the explanation is in the history of how these games worked.
Can it be simulated on GPUs? Sure. But it was typical of software renderers of that era, and NOT typical of GPUs, and it has to do with how they were used.
This is incorrect. It is exactly the same algorithm as circuits in the GPU or as instructions on the CPU. No difference, except one: the way data is pipelined on the GPU makes texture blending free, or nearly so. So to show off, every 3D game back then turned it on (an OpenGL/Glide/D3D configuration option) and everything got smoothed out, often with no option to turn it off. That's why it ends up looking different: because the game itself selected different interpolation in accelerated vs software rendered. It was a game choice.
These days you can use different presets to override those choices, and have your 8K, 240Hz Quake look software rasterized, if you want.
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"Software" isn't the point. You can do the exact same math on CPU or GPU. OpenGL supports nearest neighbor texture filtering on whatever hardware you run it on since 1992, one year before Doom even came out.
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I isn't "simulated" by GPUs, it is a rendering mode that GPUs had since before they were called GPUs.
The reason software rendering look different from 3D accelerated games (incl. 3Dfx) is nearest neighbor filtering and low resolution, which were necessary to keep a reasonable framerate. At the time, it was considered ugly, so if your hardware supported bilinear filtering for free, it was turned on, but it didn't have to.
In the time of fixed pipelines (3Dfx to GeForce 3), you couldn't do arbitrary operations on pixels, so some effects, like the kind that are common in the demoscene were software only. So games that used these effects, like Comanche voxels can indeed be thought as representative of software rendering, and they can, of course, be simulated on modern GPUs as everything that was done on software before can.
But the article uses Quake as an example. I may be wrong, but I don't think it does anything that can't be done by a fixed pipeline GPU. In fact, even keeping the same style (nearest neighbor filtering + low resolution), hardware rendering will probably look better because the GPU does proper perspective correction on every pixel. The tricks used by the Quake engine are awesome, but they don't beat raw power.
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They mean that what the OP prefers about it is not the fact that it’s done in software. “This” is “the thing the OP seems to prefer”.