This is ridiculous. He explained it perfectly and he was right stating that it has "nothing to do with software rendering". The fact that people specifically chose to do it differently on hardware makes nothing about what the article mentions specific to software rendering. Otherwise if you do the smoothing on the CPU you have to call it a hardware renderer now to be consistent.

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the_af 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not ridiculous. It's also perfectly clear from TFA, one has to go out of their way to misinterpret this.

E.g.

> Software renderers generally sample textures pixel by pixel, so every texel stays a crisp square. Early 3D cards smoothed textures with bilinear filtering, which looked impressive in 1997 but turns everything soft and blurry to my eye now.

The author is a hobbyist discussing things in context. Early 3D cards, bilinear filtering as done in '97, etc. You cannot take random words and criticize the article. This seems to be a retrogaming hobbyist blog about doing stuff with old hardware and games.

Nitpicking is pointless.

	▲	inexcf an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The point is that the look is not inherent to software rendering. You're misinterpreting this as some kind of denial of historical association. You're own quote there identifies texture filtering as the difference. Explaining that you can get those sharp textures with hardware acceleration, isn’t “pointless nitpicking.”
	▲	nkrisc an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think the comments section is the perfect place to nitpick something like this.