I've always been kind of fascinated by the state of GPUs immediately prior to fully-programmable shaders becoming the norm. It particularly comes up in the worl

I've always been kind of fascinated by the state of GPUs immediately prior to fully-programmable shaders becoming the norm. It particularly comes up in the world of emulation, where often those weird fixed-function pipelines were abused in interesting ways to produce particular effects, and now someone has to figure out how to write a shader for a modern GPU that can perfectly replicate what that old pipeline block used to do, including all the edge-cases around overflow, saturation, and so on. Unfortunately the inline demos seem to now be broken, but I found this article a fascinating treatise on how Gamecube and Wii games do things like render water: https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-effect-in-super-mario-sunshine/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef...