But, what was actually broken in OpenGL pre-Steampipe update?
The two things I know about were:
1. The different looking water (not worse, just different)
2. In the software renderer some texture sets randomly tiled to make them look less repetitive. It's nice, but I would wager a bet that no one back then even knew about this bug, let alone complained about it.
People also forget that the software renderer was very slow on contemporary hardware, and even a basic 3D card had way better performance.
It was in development for a long time at a critical point in history. It seems to have started off as a software-first project (or possibly even software-only), then switched to hardware-first near the end of development. And not every effect was implemented in the hardware renderers.
Half-Life has a lot of grid textures that really need bilinear filtering and mipmapping to look decent, and they look even better with anisotropic filtering.
Many other games that released a little later (like Decent III) actually fully removed their software renderers before release because games needed to be hardware-only if they actually wanted to compete on visual quality.
I'll concede that D3D was a dumpster fire.
But, what was actually broken in OpenGL pre-Steampipe update?
The two things I know about were:
1. The different looking water (not worse, just different)
2. In the software renderer some texture sets randomly tiled to make them look less repetitive. It's nice, but I would wager a bet that no one back then even knew about this bug, let alone complained about it.
People also forget that the software renderer was very slow on contemporary hardware, and even a basic 3D card had way better performance.
And so many things are broken in software too.
It was in development for a long time at a critical point in history. It seems to have started off as a software-first project (or possibly even software-only), then switched to hardware-first near the end of development. And not every effect was implemented in the hardware renderers.
Half-Life has a lot of grid textures that really need bilinear filtering and mipmapping to look decent, and they look even better with anisotropic filtering.
Many other games that released a little later (like Decent III) actually fully removed their software renderers before release because games needed to be hardware-only if they actually wanted to compete on visual quality.