Comment by the_af
3 days ago
It's not ridiculous. It's also perfectly clear from TFA, one has to go out of their way to misinterpret this.
E.g.
> Software renderers generally sample textures pixel by pixel, so every texel stays a crisp square. Early 3D cards smoothed textures with bilinear filtering, which looked impressive in 1997 but turns everything soft and blurry to my eye now.
The author is a hobbyist discussing things in context. Early 3D cards, bilinear filtering as done in '97, etc. You cannot take random words and criticize the article. This seems to be a retrogaming hobbyist blog about doing stuff with old hardware and games.
Nitpicking is pointless.
The point is that the look is not inherent to software rendering. You're misinterpreting this as some kind of denial of historical association. You're own quote there identifies texture filtering as the difference. Explaining that you can get those sharp textures with hardware acceleration, isn’t “pointless nitpicking.”
I don't think anyone (including the original author) is saying that the look is inherent to software renderers. The point being made is that software renders of the day tended to do things in a particular way (because CPU speed was limited), and when some of these games gained hardware renderers, they did things in a different particular way, because more computationally-expensive (for a CPU) blending modes were more or less free on a GPU.
I do agree that the author may have missed the fact that they could have overridden texture blending modes via their GPU driver, and gotten a similar graphical look using the hardware renderer. But even that's a little uncertain; there are some other comments in other subthreads that point out that the hardware rendering modes on many of these older games also did other stuff that wasn't feasible with the software renderer, and those other things sometimes can't be tweaked/disabled. So if your goal is "exact same visual style as the software renderer", you might actually have to use the software renderer.
I think the comments section is the perfect place to nitpick something like this.