> And at the rate CPUs are gaining cores, I suspect we could even pull of some really rudimentary software 3D rendering Indeed we can; we could long ago. I th

> And at the rate CPUs are gaining cores, I suspect we could even pull of some really rudimentary software 3D rendering Indeed we can; we could long ago. I think of that when I play games like Doom and Quake (which is often). They look awesome, they were software rendered. And to think that the effort on software renderers was more or less abandoned around when Unreal came out in 1998 -- that was pretty much the last FPS engine to have an advanced software mode (which looked amazing), and it worked for me back then since I didn't have a 3D accelerator. Where would we be at if that effort had continued for the next 16 years?