It wasn't that software rendering was "fast enough", it was that we didn't have hardware acceleration, so game developers had to use what they could get away wi

It wasn't that software rendering was "fast enough", it was that we didn't have hardware acceleration, so game developers had to use what they could get away with. There is a reason than every console since the PS1 has a rendering coprocessor. And why all your phones have them, and why every CPU vendor is shipping APUs now. Yea, you could make a significantly better looking software rendered quake today with 10x the triangles and texture resolution. But that game would still run 1000x faster on a GPU priced the same as the cpu doing the software rendering.