3 ms·

It may still not be an apples-to-apples comparison, but since it was running on the 486, it was by definition, doing programmable vertex transformation and shad

• erichocean 11y ago
  > it was by definition, doing programmable vertex transformation and shading Yes, all software renderers are—by definition—programmable, but those terms usually imply some kind of shading language like GLSL that is accepted at runtime, compiled and then executed by the graphics engine (hardware or software). It seems unlikely that Mr. Teapot went through the effort to write his own JIT for a 486-class machine, but certainly it could be done…
• jeffbush 11y ago
  What I meant was that the shader is a pluggable function in this implementation. If you wanted to change the shader function (say add texture or environment mapping) in this implementation, it would be a fairly minor code change that would have a relatively small incremental performance hit. If you wanted to do that for a highly optimized 90s era fixed pipeline software renderer, you'd most likely need to rewrite it from scratch, and certain operations wouldn't be feasible at all. So, this is paying a lot of the cost for flexibility up front.