> If you mean that this style can be achieved with graphics hardware

I really ought to have been more specific with my first sentence to ward off any hair-splitting.

The author claimed to love software rendering, but the examples given to highlight the supposed positives of software rendering can all be achieved on GPUs. If the author had instead highlighted the ability to easily debug and inspect the inner workings of the rasterisation pipeline with a software renderer, that might have been a much more relevant argument.

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glimshe 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with you and I think others aren't understanding your point. "Hardware rendering" can also be achieved by the CPU in "software". It will just not be realtime. Just fire up Blender and render scenes using the CPU, which is a standard option. You will see how amazing "software" rendering can be.

There's nothing special about the GPU besides doing certain kind of operations that are very useful for graphics (and AI, among other things) really efficiently. The distinction should never have been "software rendering" vs "hardware rendering", but "what CPU rendering could achieve when GPUs weren't widespread" versus "what GPU rendering has been able to achieve since they became available".

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madmoose 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the examples given to highlight the supposed positives of software rendering can all be achieved on GPUs.

Any look in older games, 2d or 3d, can be achieved on modern GPUs, so that seems like a vacuous thing to state.

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eapressoandcats 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not necessarily. Someone unfamiliar with graphics might believe that there’s something about a CPU that a graphics card doesn’t have such that the look can’t be achieved. Certainly the author of this piece seems to believe that.

	▲	the_af 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Certainly the author of this piece seems to believe that. That's unfair, especially if you read his other articles. > Someone unfamiliar with graphics ... is probably not the intended audience of a hobbyist, specialized blog such as the one we're discussing.
	▲	airesQ an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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swinglock 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

He says he likes the look, that's subjective and doesn't need arguments. You wanted to read another, technical article.

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ryandrake 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

He likes the look of nearest neighbor texture sampling, not software rendering.

You can do nearest neighbor in hardware rendering and you can do bilinear in software rendering. Rendering mode and texture sampling are two totally different things.

	▲	agumonkey 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Technically you're right, a gpu is just a bunch of ALU and FPU in a way, we just defer computation to a massive array of them so the cpu can do other things, what you do on these gpu cores is up to you. That said, historically, software rendering meant non-accelerated passes that could be carried out by a cpu at decent enough FPS. ps: some could also say that a FPU is not software rendering since early x86 didn't have it in the cpu.
	▲	fmbb an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The author likes the look of the tradeoff made due to the limitations CPU power imposed on the rendering model for real time 3D games 30 years ago. Yeah you can hack configurations or create your own game to mimic this look. If you read the post you will see it’s not only about the texture sampling, but also the color depth. OP picked a good headline. You are fighting for semantics nobody cares about, and picking a more complicated synecdoche.

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adastra22 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But if you want to experience GLQuake that looks like software-rendered Quake, that's a simple settings change in your GPU driver, overriding the texture sampling mode. That's literally the only difference. I'm not sure the author is aware that it is a viable option to tweak the hardware rendering this way.

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onli 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are you sure? I haven't played enough Quake to know either way, but I did play Deus Ex in software mode (unreal engine), and that had a lot of differences to the other renderers. I very much doubt texture sampling mode alone would reach a similar result.

(It even had graphic errors, green textures in the faces etc giving everything a very alien look. But that's not what I mean).

	▲	seba_dos1 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It depends on particular renderer, obviously. Not all software renderers were being given appropriate care.
	▲	swinglock 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's not correct. A notable example is the water effects.

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paulryanrogers 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

May be a couple settings. IIRC full bright textures didn't translate well in early GPU renderers. Often they'd appear shaded as if they weren't light sources at all.