Here’s an analogy. Suppose someone said, “I love manual transmission cars” and then described in detail the physical knobs and dials that all the cars from the 1950s had.

It turns out what they like is physical knobs and dials. You can have those in automatic transmission cars. It so happens that most modern automatics also have shitty touchscreens.

(I know this analogy isn’t precise because there was a long period of automatics with physical controls, but bear with me.)

The point is that there’s nothing _inherent_ to software rendering that’s responsible for the thing he likes. The distinction is useful because, for example, he could go seek out modern games with the look he likes. Or make games. And if he thought the thing he likes comes from having a software renderer, he’d leave a lot of performance and power efficiency on the table for no good reason. He likes a certain rendering style that’s equally achievable with both GPU and CPU rendering. The choice of hardware should probably be driven by considerations like performance, debuggability, platform support, availability of libraries, etc.

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squidmaster 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah, I see. Maybe: somebody says they love audio cassette players, and start talking about the super tactile mechanical buttons and switches that go chunk in a satisfying way. You could rightly object that that you can put buttons like that on an mp3 player. But it's a historical fact that these things are actually linked, in a way that's meaningful to people, namely in their personal nostalgic experiences.

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BugsJustFindMe 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> But it's a historical fact that these things are actually linked

You might think that if you didn't know about the breadth of cassette players, but you'd be wrong on the technical merits, because cassette players existed that did not have those buttons (and also those buttons predate cassette players).

Describing your love of a certain kind of button as a love of things that play cassettes is a misattribution. If you had said "I like the audio cassette players that have those kinds of buttons because those buttons are amazing" you'd have hit the truth encased in the trappings of your nostalgia.

	▲	squidmaster 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Cassette players and chunky buttons are historically linked though. That there's no intrinsic fundamental technological connection and counter-examples exist doesn't change the fact that most people with memories of cassette players will have memories of chunky buttons connected to that. You're hung up on technicalities when the discussion is actually about nostalgia. In an case, the author specifically cites the example of Ion Fury, a game which ships with a hardware renderer enabled by default but also uses nearest neighbor interpolation, so the premise that the author isn't aware that the aesthetic isn't possible with hardware rendering is mistaken. He knows. He's calling it software rendering because that's what the aesthetic is historically connected to.