Comment by torginus
2 days ago
However well intentioned your post may be in explaining this, it misses my point.
There's no single oldschool look, as people writing software renderers didn't have a sanctioned way of doing so - a lot of them weren't even using triangles, or were using a mix of techniques.
You are describing how to make a game look like the PS1 games, but the PS1 actually had a - somewhat flawed, but unique - GPU which kind of forced the limitations you outlined here, and forced a singular way of rendering.
That wasn't really true with Quake or Duke3D or the PC in general. You just drew to the screen with whatever technique you chose, which resulted in a unique look for each game.
What I think they are trying to tell you is that there isn't a single sanctioned way of doing modern accelerated rendering. One could argue there was when GPUs were less flexible and had a fixed pipeline, but modern day GPUs are absurdly versatile, and just as capable of handling any form of rendering that had to be done mainly in the CPU, either through compute shaders, or by creatively using the raytracing or rasterization pipelines. There have been some talks about ditching the traditional pipelines model altogether and moving towards an all computer shader + intrinsics model for modern APIs, inspired by CUDA, even. That's how flexible they've become.
In Quake's case, it uses rasterization. Modern GPUs' rasterization pipeline are extremely configurable, not even needing triangles as immediate inputs anymore.
Doesn't Duke3D use the same rendering method as Doom? While there's no specific acceleration for column-based rendering, compute shaders can replicate the same behavior, but in parallel.
Modern GPUs can handle, from raymarched fractals, to raytraced voxels, to rasterized PS1-inspired scenes, etc. It's not like styles are lacking. If anything, GPUs have provided opportunities for more weird combinations by making other techniques viable as well. Contrast that to past, where techniques were cutoff by hardware limitations, resulting in similar ones being used to achieve the same results (both Doom and Duke3d use column-based rendering, for instance).