Wrote a little software rasterizer for a roguelike years back and the best part was just being able to step through the whole pipeline in a debugger. No driver weirdness, no shader compile quirks, the pixel is wrong because your math is wrong.

This should really be titled "I love pixelated textures".

> "3D cards smoothed textures with bilinear filtering"

You can just not do that.

UE5's nanite uses software rendering, but it doesn't look pixelated, does not need a high end computer, and does not require DOS.

I share the same opinion as the author. That said, it's also important to remember that the display devices of the time were different than they are now and the sharp pixelated textures we see now would look a bit different on a CRT from that period. The sharp, gritty look that he (and I) admire would have been just a little fuzzier back then.

This isn't software rendering, it's called turning off spatial anti-aliasing. You can still do that in the modernest of modern games. Software rendering went out of the window because the CPU tends to have other things to do whilst playing the game besides only multiplying 4x4 matrices, which was shifted to the shader cores of GPUs. The look-and-feel that OP is discussing including shadow and texture LUTs can also be done on GPUs; there is nothing specific to software rendering. It bears mentioning that many modern software renderers (LLVMpipe/Lavapipe, OpenSWR, WARP) are basically full D3D/OpenGL/Vulkan devices in their own right, including shader compilers.

Also, modern spatial anti-aliasing works by multisampling within a pixel (or even neighbouring pixels) and taking the average, rather than filtering across singly-sampled pixels, which massively reduces the quality. Not to mention temporal and machine learning AA techniques including DLSS, XeSS, FSR, and all the TAA implementations in many games.

The article says that "even a 3.3GHz quad-core Xeon “isn’t quite enough to run Shadow Warrior at full 1600 by 1200”." But we are on DOS, so I guess three cores are just not doing anything there?

Anyone wants to tell him about CRT's?

Now that will truly blow his mind, at least on this setup and older games.

I too. So that I have written many software renderers in many years. A video with my recent project having a software renderer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NepOPAPDvwA

> Ion Fury, a Build engine game from 2019, still ships with a software renderer.

Amazing game BTW, best shooter I've played in many years. I never really got into build engine games back then, so it's not just my rose-tinted glasses, that game is a masterpiece.

> Games worth trying

I can add more:

Unreal (and Unreal Tournament), Thief, Quake II (a slight improvement over Quake), Half-Life (a great improvement over Quake), Shadow Warrior, Any modern port of Doom supporting software rendering, Heretic, Hexen, Descent, System Shock, Homeworld.

Is software rendering the reason that people can run doom on everything?