4 ms·
>Why wouldn't software rendering be fast enough now that it is orders of magnitude faster than when it was fast enough? Because games in the 90s used < 1k poly
by moonchrome 12y ago
>Why wouldn't software rendering be fast enough now that it is orders of magnitude faster than when it was fast enough?
Because games in the 90s used < 1k poly models for characters, I don't think you could get away with those nowdays, not even on mobile.
- fulafel 12y agoUnreal Tournament 2004 had a software renderer with good performance, on the single core CPUs of the era. See http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/optimizing-pixomatic-for-x86-processors/184405765 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/optimizing-pi... The people working on that, Abrash and Sartain, went on to Intel to do Larrabee - something akin to "software renderer on GPU". If that had worked out, maybe we wouldn't be in the current dark ages, where GPUs are a nightmare to program and everybody suffers from the buggy, closed proprietary software stacks that hide the hardware behind many layers of obfuscation.