Comment by chpatrick
3 days ago
"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.
3 days ago
"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.
But in practice, this didn't happen, which is what TFA seems to be all about. So it's not incorrect to talk about software renderers (of the time) vs hardware accelerated graphics (of the time) and how they were used in practice (at the time). It's just cumbersome to write "at the time", and it's understood from context; at least I did. It also helps to look at the rest of the blog's articles and what the blog is about...
Sure, software rendering mostly used nearest neighbor, but it's not crisp because it's software rendering, which is what the article claims.
I disagree. The article is making claims about software renderers of the time vs hardware accelerated renderers of the time, as they typically worked. It's missing the point completely to believe the author of a blog seemingly dedicated to old games and old hardware is making a general claim about software renderers and GPUs as understood now. Context matters!
The author didn't qualify every word he wrote with "of the time" and "typically", possibly because he didn't expect their article to be nitpicked on HN, but a cursory reading shows that's what he meant.