Remember 3D games with software render?
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- Опубликовано: 2 май 2024
- After the rise of 3D accelerated graphics, many games still offered software render, until they didn't. In this video, we will check out a few of these "last of its kind" games.
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Fun Fact: Croc was made as a demo for a 3D Yoshi's Island game. Unfortunately Nintendo went with another developer, so they retooled it and we have Croc. Glad they did too. It was a great game in it's time and holds up quite well.
I'm glad it happened that way because otherwise I wouldn't have played it as a kid. I had a PS1 back then, not N64.
Why should Nintendo have gone with some outside proposal? the developer of Croc proved they could make their own stand alone game so even if there was a story in there it does not mean anything cause it was not used and worse the developer did not bother to make a N64 version... maybe cause they planned for some huge multi platform thing to cash in on the craze created by the N64 and Super Mario 64 game.
@@apollosungod2819 They had an open call for a demo regarding it. That's why. Nintendo didn't bite. It's that simple. I'm not sure if the devs or Nintendo themselves said no to it being on the platform. The devs talked about it in an article from a long time ago
@@apollosungod2819argonaut software worked with Nintendo on Star Fox already and the partnership was going well
I love playing Quake with its software renderer. The shadows are so much deeper and the atmosphere is more moody than when it's played with 3D acceleration. And when I play it on a 2GHZ+ Athlon, I can crank that resolution up really high and it looks awesome, haha.
That's probably because of GLQuake's awful gamma control. If you try modern source ports, they look properly lit, even with hardware renderers.
@@mopeybloke Darkplaces and Quakespasm come to mind. Darkplaces has great lighting and handles realtime shadows, Quakespasm is just FAAAAST.
Quake I released as a DOS game without GL support! Windows and GL support were both patched in later. Agreed Quake I is much better played in software mode at some insane resolution like 1600x1200.
I played Carmageddon, Moto Racer, NFS 1 & 2 SE, TR, WC98, FIFA 98,99 all in Software render on my 100Mhz Pentium back then.
Redline Racer was the first game that I couldn't run due to the need of a 3d card.
redline racer was awesome. by buddy had it on his pentium II gateway 2000
Redline Racer had such a funny selection of vehicles unlockable by cheats.
My first 3d only game was Quake 3.
Same. I disliked the blurry Glide3D mode a lot, especially in Carmageddon.
My first was Episode 1 Racer. Everything before that I ran without a 3D card. MTM2, Midtown Madness, MotoRacer, TNFS...I remember the days.
My first video card was an S3 Trio, so software renderer was pretty much all I could play with. Of course, I played Doom, but my favorite was the Heretic and Hexen games.
Hey at least you could do early Direct3D titles if not OpenGL ones, those of us with an S3 Virge couldn't do either :D
I love the crunchy pixels, it would be great to see a modern game in software mode!
you could do swiftshader
i do too! i also don't like HD movies, they look too weird to me. i like the cinema filter cause that's how it was when i was growing up. i'm also old now.
Swift shader only works up to dx9 @@cal2127
The new System Shock remake does with unfiltered textures.
Check out a game called Dusk. It intentionally has the look of software rendering and allows you to fine tune the crispness.
I wrote several software renderers back in the days. For my last engine creation, I was still using software rendering exclusively long after hardware 3D got popular, because it interested me more. I finally gave in and added hardware support to it, but kept the software renderer. In fact, it's still in there, now upped to 24 bit color, texture filtering, mip mapping and multi-threading support. It's still useful for some quick and dirty stuff that runs on everything including older machines with out of date drivers.
Open source it?
Video mode with 32 bit color and with linear framebuffer?
@@maxmuster7003 Yes, but running under modern OSs, so no fiddling with DOS or Vesa drivers. My older DOS based stuff used these, but was limited to 256 colours.
@@EORetro I used the VBE 3 bios at first on Geforce 4 TI 4200 AGPx4 on 19" CRT Samsung/Samtron monitor with 96 khz capacity in 1024x768x32 at 100 hz refreshrate using the linear framebuffer with VBE3 triple buffering in MS DOS 6.22 using the undocumented 16 bit BIG Real Mode. But i am bad on math and never figure it out how to calculate 3D graphic.
In 1997 I added a diamond monster 3d with to my cyrix 120+ and it was the best experience with quake and tombraider. Back then it was nearly impossible to play those games in software rendering and in higher resolution than 320x240
In 1997 I upgraded from 486DX4-100 with S3 Trio32 to Pentium 166MMX with Diamond Monster 3D. This was the biggest technological and quality leap I've ever experienced in my life. It's actually was shocking (in a good sense) how suddenly games like Tomb Raider, Quake, Hexen II, Mechwarrior 2, Descent 2, NFS 3 that barely crawled in 320*200 started flying in high resolution 640*480, looking smooth and more colorful than ever. Good times.
And then those purists trying to race to hell with the pixelated software renderer.. Sure since its running on modern cpus it was fast, but def not on period correct cpus.
One game you might want to check out is Outcast from 1999, which has a very impressive software renderer. It combines a voxel heightmap with polygonal models similar to later Comanche games.
I loved the look of that game back in the day. It really killed my CPU though. I had to run it at lowest resolution
@@RetroPcCupboard I first played it in 2002, by then I had a beefy enough Athlon processor to run it at the maximum resolution of 512x384. The fast that they included separate executables optimized for different processors says it all.
The biggest problem with voxel graphics is, they can't found a good way for hardware acceleration, do it needed a good CPU to run well.
I played this one out of my k6 II in W98 without any problems. Great game and the sequel was released a few weeks ago. Unfortunately the sequel is way more taxing then the original. Not a great game like the first, but still a good one nonetheless.
@@Neomalthusiano I'm still contemplating whether I should buy The New Beginning. I'll probably wait until it's on sale and they patch away some of the jank.
The biggest difference in Q2 is that there is no multi-colored lightmaps in software renderer. I remember, it was a pretty big deal back then. Same thing with HL2 and Hexen II afaik. Unreal, though, had colored lightmaps even in software mode, which was actually pretty cool. Rune and CB's Undying also, since they are on Unreal 1 engine.
Yes! To add to this: Q2 software renderer was 8-bit palette, and no coloured lighting. Half life software renderer did 16-bit color and coloured lighting.
More memorable for Unreal, though, is the dithering in place of bilinear filtering.
Croc! I loved that game so much. Reminds me of my 2nd youngest. He had this in his room for a while. He used to play Croc all the time. It was his entry to video games. Now he's 24 years old. Just graduated college and is working as a FedEx delivery man. Time flies. I'm going to cry now lol.
I ditched software rendering when I saw Quake OpenGL. I was hooked!
Thanks for giving some love to Software Rendering :)
Software rendering was too slow as I recall. But I guess it’s easier easier now with much faster CPUs than the Pentium 2 I had.
Yup definitely back in the day not a good option. The Athlon 64 I used is way newer and more powerful.
Have you ever played Voxlap by Ken Silverman? It puts Minecraft to shame, and plays over 100 frames per second, pure software CPU rendering.
I wouldn't call it too slow. An early Pentium will comfortably do 320x200 resolution. When it came to 3D accelerators, 640x480 was standard, plus 16-bit 565 colour and enhanced rendering techniques fit for the resolution, texture filtering, so you had more of a quality advantage than framerate advantage.
Outcast is worth a special mention, a high end game without 3D accelerator support, which derived its visuals from software 3D rendering with volumetric landscapes and pixel shaders, which weren't possible on 3D accelerators of the time, but it did require an MMX 200 or a better CPU at the minimum just for 320x240.
Yeah, I remember playing HL1 in 320x240. A crosshair was so big a monster could hide behind. And I turned on 800x600 to look at advanced graphics in slide show, to imaging, how it all be cool, when I will buy new PC some years later.
The main problem of this type of software rendering is bad scaling. Due to the inherently low fill rate, overdraw and transparency quickly tanked the framerate. Therefore optimization was key, and let's not forget the benefit of hardware independency.
Not gonna lie, really love those crunchy pixels 😅 They have a charm of their own. Whenever i fire up the original Quake, I play it in software mode.
Even with Doom, i ise a modern source port (ZDoom) but even then i play with the original software renderer, just taking advantage of the widescreen resolution. That's the setup that feels "right" to me
Back in the day, I remember playing Mortal Kombat 4 softwere mode. When I saw the 3d rendered game, I was: WOW. Huge grapghics change! But the gameplay was the same, so after all, softwere render still brings that fun and joy of those retro games. Great video, Phill.
If you revisit this topic, consider including Outcast -- 100% Voxels, software rendering only.
Noted!
That was my first thought. Good game too! Got a remake a few years ago.
FIFA (and all EA sports) and NFS and Carmageddon were already mentioned, so, I would add Resident Evil 3, Moto Racer 1 and 2, Ignition, POD, Blood 2: The Chosen, Thief 1 and 2, even Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, Actua Soccer 3, Mortal Kombat 4, CART Precision Racing, Counterstrike, Deus Ex, Destruction Derby 2, Test Drive (4?), Delta Force 2 (I don't think that the 1st had 3D acceleration) and some of the other Novalogic games at the time like Tachyon: The Fringe, Diablo 2 had some 3D support, Descent 2 was patched for various 3D APIs, Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2, Sin, Hexen 2, Heretic 2, Homeworld, Requiem: Avenging Angel.
Wow awesome list!
Very good list. 2 favorites for me what is missing from the list: Recoil, MDK
@@ityamfiam Oh, yes! Forgot about those two. I think that only MDK 2 was accelerated only, while MDK (1) I remember playing in software and either Glide or D3D (don't remember exactly which of the two). For Recoil, I only played the demo a few times. On the subjsect, Mechwarrior 3 (I think that it had the same engine as Recoil) had a software redenderer too.
I think Dark Forces II was the first FPS I played that I really got into. It is still one of my favorite PC games, and I would argue it's one of the best Star Wars games ever made. The 3D acceleration doesn't work on modern Windows, though. It's fine without it, but it would be nice to get it working.
not to forget: Warzone 2100, Machines by Acclaim, Colin McRae Rally ...
That's cool !! 😁
For me OpenLara GBA is the fifth essence of software rendered 3D graphics on the Game Boy Advance 😍
In the late 2000s when I had a dying graphics card and had no money to buy a new one, games and console emulators that supported software rendering helped my kid self quite a lot. It also was my first introduction to many great retro games. Thank you for reminding me of that era!
I remember being excited about Unreal when I upgraded my system to an AMD K6-2 300, as it used 3DNow! for the software renderer, giving you reflective surfaces, but it was so much slower than proper 3D acceleration it felt like it was a tech demo, rather than something usable. I was actually kind of mad that I couldn't combine 3DNow! with the Voodoo3 3500 card I was using at the time, since that was one of the selling points that caused me to choose AMD over Intel, misunderstanding the usefulness.
The Voodoo was still the best option for that CPU, because Glide render was just the best.
Unreal 1...wasn't that "just" MMX?
Only game where AMD 3DNow(+) made a difference was Quake II, right?
And "NOW"adays We only have INTEL instruction sets...(Hrmph! From a Phenom 1100T😛)
@@dallesamllhals9161 Unreal 1 had some variant with real time shadows. It required a Creative TNT video card, so unfortunately I only saw some pictures of it, nothing more. I hoped that it will work with my TNT2 card, but no, it was tied to that video card for some reason.
Don't forget Outcast with its software voxel renderer, and all the 3D games on the Game Boy Advance!!
“Croc, The Legend of Gobbos” is a part of my childhood and I have good memories with it! But it didn’t run well in software mode using a K6-II 350 MHz, 32MB of RAM and integrated graphics from SiS (which theft 4MB of RAM).
Software rendered 90's games was how i played most of my early games until i upgraded my P60 to a P166mhz and got my first 2D/3D accelerator card, the Matrox Mystique. I still prefer the software render to this day, especially the lack of shadows in game.
UT99 in software looks great, very raw looking. Not necessarily pixelated, just raw. Engine was remarkable on how fast it was with software render. I prefer its look to 3D accelerated, but it's not fast enough for todays standard.
Would be interesting to see if you can get a semi period-accurate build to get UT 2004's software mode to a playable state!
I've played quake 1 an 2 onde software render
Shogoooooo!
"Be careful, Sanjuro. They know you're coming."
"Great! Then they'll know who killed 'em!"
Voodoo is nice, but not with todays pricing tag. GF 4MX/5xxx/6xxx, ATI 9250/9550/9600 are excellent choices, even capable run of early WinXP games.
HW or SW - I think its more of personal. I prefer HW with filtered textures, and even with AF/AA.
I am a great fan of early 3D-games. Fascinating to see how they worked around the limitations and pushed the boundaries.
Software was the only way to write a program once & run it anywhere. Now supporting every hardware feature almost requires a complete rewrite for every GPU.
Nobody does that. Instead you use engine and engine uses API like DirectX . DirectX on the other hand contacts drivers, and drivers are made for specific GPUs.
@@aleksazunjic9672 You understood his point?
@@cooperfeld I pretend I do 🤪
@@aleksazunjic9672
Most of us had a Pentium or PentiumII for Windows 98 back then, that Atholon CPU came out much later, we could only wish for those resolutions and fps your reporting during that period.
Very true it was cheaper to add a 3d graphics card ....in 98 a voodoo 2 was 200$
@@federicocatelli8785 Had a Matrox Millenium, made a world a difference compared to software rendering.
CROC! Thanks a lot for reminding me of this game. Man I used to play this a lot but completely forgot
When it comes to software rendering, it's always interesting to see games that do things that hardware rendering couldn't - like the large voxel-based environments in Outcast. It's also really cool to check out some of the demoscene stuff like, well, basically anything from Federation Against Nature.
Still Sucking Nature looks better than Doom 3 and has lower system requirements.
I can also remember the good old software renderer very well. It always required a powerful CPU. People used to make fun of people who used something like that... "there you are again with your office crap".... But I can imagine that at some point it will go back in that direction and graphics will be taken over by AI or special software renderers in order to save on the hardware mode that is very energy-hungry today. Without hardware you would save space, energy, heat generation and production costs for complex graphics. It would be a bit like streaming where the end device only outputs the finished image.
What's funny is that Linux has a fallback software rendered Vulkan driver in case the GPU installed doesn't support Vulkan, and it's hilarious seeing modern games being ran through it. what's even more funny is that they recently added ray-tracing support to the software driver.
Windows has a software graphics driver too, I think Linus tried running Crysis on Windows on a 64-core Threadripper and it is actually kinda runs (though with a lot of stuttering and terrible utilization)
I didn’t have good experience with early ATI Rage 3D cards: nice on advertisement, magazine ads, but not really operational in reallity. I recall the promise to run Quake 2 on it but didn’t manage back in the day. Evertyhing changed when 3dfx came, and that was my first “real 3D” graphic card. Unreal is still today the game I use to demonstrate software vs hardware rendering: it was “unreal” at that time, and Glide specially shined. I was so sad when 3dfx tanked…. I still keep my Voodoos 2, 3, 5 around, don’t use then much as they cannot be replaced, as you pointed out.
I rembember how different Midtown Madness 1 looked on my Matrox MGA Mystique, on an ATI Rage and on software render, often on a NeoMagic MagicGraph.
I recall playing Independence War in software mode, it was impressive it was really well done, most of the time I could not notice major difference to hardware accelerated version. It was also much easier to setup in software mode. Really cool space sim.
Every time You say "I used to play this back in the day.....", my heart starts beating faster.
I remember playing these games on my cousins Pentium 1 75Mhz with some graphics and then a Celeron 533 and eventually got a Pentium 3 800 from junk in 2003.
Another superb quality video. Phil, thank You for the MS-DOS "menu" that You created in the past. It's just perfect. Along with additional smartdrv and other stuff gives us a tremendous msdos environmnet. THANK YOU!
I was waiting to see UT 2004, one of (if not) the last games to ship with a built-in software renderer. This was at a time when 3D accelerators were pretty ubiquitous, of course, so I remember being quite surprised. Likewise, it was more of a curiosity, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
2004 sounds like ages ago, but in terms of computer graphics, that's the year Half-Life 2 came out, so having a software renderer is pretty crazy...
Thanks for another great video, always looking forward for the next one
I'm quite fond of the crisp software rendering. When texture filtering came in with the new fangled 3d cards, some games I felt looked a little "muddy" and soft.
I played Star Trek Armada in Safe Mode (software) for a couple years until dad got me a Rage 128 Pro PCI; so much better :)
I didn't know about graphics cards because there were no RUclipsrs to teach me about it back in 2005. I thought I needed more ram to play need for speed. Good times.
It's kind of ironic: Back when 3D games were new, using a 3D card would give you the best, sharpest graphics, and software rendering would often be blockier with rougher textures. Now, if you run an emulator for a console that had 3D hardware in it, like the PS2, setting it to software rendering will give you the most accurate graphics, while using a 3D card for rendering, often has graphical glitches.
Yeah it's kind of cool to think about how modern CPUs are just so insanely fast that they can easily beat 3d accelerated hardware from 15 years ago by emulating it in software.
There were also some games (like P.O.D.) that supported "MMX acceleration" without 3D graphics card. 16-bit color, filtering and other effects were very basic, the FPS was low, but the user could try real 3D using only the CPU. Could be intersting to review such a topic.
Oh yes! Can't remember that one ever saw a video comparing stars versions of games to "MMX accelerated" ones. Since I was a _very_ proud owner of a Pentium 200 MMX (a hell of a machine back then, which I still have), I would love to see that.
Cool, I remember so well all those great nights spent playing Quake2 or UT99 deatmatch or Duke Nukem 3D or Carmaggeddon. All those games were so fun and the software renderers were perfectly fine.. The good thing about software renderer is that those games were easy to run on later pc's even without 3D gfx cards.
You can disable texture filtering with a command on the modern Steam version of Half-Life so that the textures (and especially blood decals) look authentic.
Nice!
All of the games aside from the last 2 were some of my favourites as a kid, what an awesome time to be a gamer.
Motorhead. It is a racing game what had a very good software renderer at the time when games more and more practically required at least a voodoo card.
I very much missed Extreme Assault, an incredibly good looking arcade helicopter shooter by Blue Byte of Siedler fame. The best way to play it was - of course - via 3DFX Glide, but it also had a very decent software renderer with support for extremely impressive alpha effects.
I haven't played it in ages, but i fondly remember it for its impressive graphics, solid gameplay, and absolutely awesome redbook audio soundtrack by the one and only Chris Hülsbeck.
Thanks for sharing Phil!
You bet! Feels great to be back and being productive.
Nice! You showed Shogo, exactly where you got stuck :)
Yes! And in software render no issues! So I really believe it's a FPS tied to physics engine but it something....
Great job making this video I really enjoy it! I'm a big fan of late 90s and early 2000s pc gaming; because it's what I grew up with. Currently my retro pc is an 'acer-aspire' "one zg8" with windows xp (sp3 2002) that I'm still configuring to get my 32bit library working (finding drivers on internet archive). This makes me want a desktop lol.
I was pretty early on hardware acceleration as I had a voodoo II in my Mac (there were dozens of us!) and I was able to get PowerMac g4 and a Radeon 9600 Pro.
For me software mode was the thing you did when you didn’t have a GPU, but is we the appeal as all of us remember games as we played them. I was lucky to have a voodoo 2.
I only play old DOS games with chunky pixels. All these games you mentioned I played on our Win98 build with an AGP 3D accelerated configuration, mostly played them in OpenGL, maybe some of them in D3D mode.
Unreal Tournament also supports software render, as well as open GL and Direct 3D. It also has the same texture dithering effect you saw in Unreal if I remember correctly. I played it on a 400mhz windows 98 IBM desktop, those were desperate times.
Looks awesome with the more intricate level design. The filtering is 'metal' and raw looking. The raw music to go with it, nails the atmosphere perfectly. I only used OpenGL once figuring out you could, because it ran faster, it looked terrible.
Something about Bi/Trilinear filtering just ruining textures.
Unreal Tournament 2004 surprisingly had a software renderer too. I wonder how many people unironically used it.
i m absolutly love the pixelated look! need for speed 2, half life, quake, quake 2 are the games that come in my mind when thinking about that time.
I wonder what ever happened to my 3DFX Voodoo 2 Graphic Card :) I do remember spending a great deal on my first Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 back in the day when they were brand new.
Software render on Quake 2, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament was a godsend for those of us with an S3 Virge 3D Decelerator :D
I miss those early days, my first 3D accelerator was the Matrox Mystique, it had a whopping 2mb of vram! Man, we had so many choices of GPU's back then, Virge 3d, 3dFX, Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, PowerVR, Rendition Verite.
Interesting video, thanks mate, saludos!
I remember when the MMX versions of the INTEL chips hit. Finally allowing for bilinear filtering. Issue was those came out just as 3DFX really was taking over all of gaming. So no one cared. Pod, MDK being some of the first taking advantage of MMX.
Unreal’s software engine I think is the climax of software engines of that era. It was doing some brilliant FX all in software.
6:34 For some reason I thought one of Unreal's selling points was that it didn't require a 3D accelerator, turns out I was thinking of Unreal Tournament. "DOES NOT REQUIRE INTERNET ACCESS OR A 3D CARD" (I guess because Quake III REQUIRED an OpenGL 3D Card and it came out a month after UT)
Half life plays great at 800x600 on my t420 windows 98 installation and the software rendering does an amazing job!
The majority of people would have experienced those very early 3D games exclusively in software rendered mode. The 3D acceleration market really started to take off in a very serious way in 1999 and absolutely exploded in 2000, when it became essential for any PC build that took gaming into consideration. I remember Quake 3 being the first game that outright required a 3D acceleration card and would not work without one.
Carmack truly is a legend. He pushed 3d and the market hard.
Why were PCs late to the game? 3do came out 1993. PSX 1994 . First accelerators for PC appear, while Doom did not even support SVGA .
My computer renders Phil's videos with ease! Because they're the best!
Ahh back in the days of just having integrated graphics, I recall saving up for two years to buy GTA Vice City. As Australia had it rated for mature 14+ but here in NZ it was 18+ (I was 14 at the time). Got it home so excited to play it, only to find our Compaq with a Celeron and Intel 815 graphics ran at 1-2fps outside of the spawn point haha. Loved playing Croc as well, it ran quite well in Software mode on a Toshiba 330 CDS a friend had, despite the terrible DTSN display
Hehe this reminds me of certain games being banned in Germany but you could import them from Austria 😅
@@philscomputerlab Haha the things people had to do to get their hands on a band or restricted title. I guess still the same with VPN's being used to watch geo locked netflix
Back in the day (1997) for me it was cheaper to upgrade my Pentium 75 Setup with a Voodoo 1; played Tomb Raider, Half Life and GTA and had a blast. At this time the raw look of software rendering without filtering was a no go for me xD Also the experience was much smoother. But i like your perspective. But to be realistic: to play later games in software mode you need CPUs that there very expensive or not released at the release of some games (anyone remember Trespasser...okay...this was sometimes only playable in software mode).
Yes you indeed need something very capable. I mean this is a fast Athlon 64 and in some games a better CPU could help, especially if you want to run higher resolutions.
I have a couple of the none voodoo cards mentioned. However Software rendering doesn't sound so bad after all. Croc and Viking games looked interesting. Glad you showcased some other games as I'm kind of stuck in a rut and not sure what to play!
I like the look of software rendered games. Laser Arena I always play that in Software mode.
I like software rendered 3D. I'm actually writing my own software rendered 3D engine.
Amazing 😍
I was playing around with a student learner a former job.
Tried to get a FarmingSim2021 Server running but failed at the client not supporting DX12.
What did work was RDP to the server and run the game through that software renderer.
Did not run very well with it being old v2 Xeons trimmed for Energy Efficiency. But it ran. Maybe even better with a more modern CPU for Software rendering.
Thanks for sharing.
Of course I remember. Finished Half-Life in 320x200 on a Cyrix 6x86 200+ and a 1MB S3 Trio 64. Those were the days!
That's an achievement!
Newer versions of Windows include a Direct3D software renderer - if you install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a machine with an unsupported GPU, Aero Glass still works (on later versions it isn't as noticeable due to the Metro design).
It's called dxcpl.exe from what I remember
Soooo... you can play games in software render mode somehow better with a specific Windows build? Or?
The first game where I ever saw 3D acceleration with my own eyes was Monster Truck Madness. It looked cool, but it ran slow (S3 Virge). That's when I knew the software render was coming to an end.
I used to play Half-Life in software mode sometimes because I always find the textures a bit blurry for my taste, plus the water had a nice looking effect on them (very similar to the distortion effect you could applied to texture on Unreal engine). But generally speaking I think I will always love that crunchy pixel look that games from the 90s used to had. Software mode rules !
I love the pixelated look on 3D games as well. Tomb Raider, Quake, Croc, Half-Life was those games that in the beginning there was no other way to play software mode.
Later yes, we upgraded to a 3dfx voodoo card and got faster and smooth graphics. But i still can play those games in software mode ;-)
When Half-Life released in 1998 there were lots of 3D cards available for a few years at that point.
Fun fact: There was a way to get 3d hardware style filtering in software mode for quake2.. I can't remember how but I managed to do this although my FPS went from 30 to about 2! Still, for a slideshow it looked pretty.
Quake 2 was the switch for me, I startet with software render in 512*384 on a Pentium 120 and added a voodoo 1 while playing it, to silky smooth 640*480 3DfxGL. That was huge step visualy.
Not promoting my channel, but check out Dice's Motorhead (1998). Besides all kinds of 3D support it also has an amazing software renderer, which is able to display things some later 3D cards fail to show even. And yeah. late 90s 3D cards have gotten really expensive these days, even low end stuff like S3 Savage 4s. Crazy!
Tried to run Half-Life in software mode using emulated Pentium II machine, and i hsve to say as much as it might look decent enough, the fps drop vs using OpenGL accelleration make it why people bsck then dreamed about having 3D accelerator cards.
phil make a video for softgpu, it is great project and creates alternative for modern system with 3d acceleration withouth needing old pci card
I remember this golden age very well, started gaming in 1994 on 486s, Pentium and Athlon CPU between 1996 to 2002. You defintely forget to mention those fps games like Goldeneye or Duke Nukem 3D which both looked awesome in Software mode (although there has been no hardware accelerated version) Props for the video, the chosen system is awesome! ❤😊
Goldeneye was only on N64.
@@lmcgregoruk that is not entirely correct. The game was ported to the switch and the Xbox as well, and (as unbelievable it might sound to You) it has been ported to emulators for PC.
@@tagesvaterpatrick8780 Yes, but like I said Goldeneye WAS only on N64, sure you could run it with UltraHLE, but you needed a 3D card for UltraHLE. There was never a port of Goldeneye for PC that used software rendering in the late 90's. I mean they remade it for Wii as Goldeneye 007, then updated that to Goldeneye reloaded for Xbox 360/PS3. I remember it was going to be released on XBLA till the owners of the IP nixed it(Barbara Broccoli specifically), then it did eventually get given to owners of the digital edition of Rare Replay, but not physical disc owners (like me).
As for Duke Nukem 3D, I'm pretty sure the original release ONLY had software rendering, there was no 3D card support, although there was support for stereoscopic 3D.
@@lmcgregoruktouchè
the most impresive game that I play (a lot) with software render was Unreal Tournament
The texture filtering of unreal was really smart. It was like a quick precalc check board sampling from the surrounds. Or something. If you google there is tech doc explaining it. Brute simple force but smart and super cheap
There are actually software vulkan and opengl renderers on linux, the vulkan one even recently got some support for ray tracing (it is of course extremely slow). They're mainly used for development and validation but you can actually use them render opengl, vulkan, (and directx via wine) games very slowly on the cpu.
I remember back in the late 1990s when I still had game news websites as my homepage, some game company employees announced they were working on a revolutionary new game engine that would make GPUs irrelevant............never heard anything else about it.
These days even getting a lesser known 3dfx Voodoo Banshee sets you back at least around $100, and it isn't even a card able to render later Win98 DX 7 titles since the drivers only (officially) support up to DX 6.0 . Since the primary advantage is speed ( though anti-aliasing and transparent textures do look nice ), using the software renderer or opengl or a glide wrapper probably has become the best choice - provided you got yourself a fast system where you got CPU performance to spare.
My best recommendation for an AGP graphics card for that time period still is a ATI Radeon 9200 / 9250, because it can be had for around $10 and simply works on most boards for most games.
As for PCI you can't really go wrong with the S3 Phil defaults to, but there are more powerful alternatives: The Nvidia Riva 128ZX ( around $100 ), or better yet the Sapphire Ati Radeon 7000 PCI ( around $25, and be careful to not get an AGP version ).
Going VLB, it probably would be a simple Cirrus Logic GD542X for around $40 ( avoid the Tseng ET4000, because it's about as expensive as a Voodoo ).
And with ISA, there really only is the one: Trident 9000. Not that is fast, or can do high resolutions. As a matter of fact, avoid ISA graphics cards if you can. But this one cost around $40 and simply works.
Oh and fair warning: Any ISA, most VLB and some early PCI graphics cards require loading a VESA bios for full video mode support beyond 320x200 ( if you got the VRAM ).
I believe there are quite a few Unreal engine 1 games that keep the software rendering Engine. Like Rune That was shown.
Deus Ex is another one of them.
Yes you are right!
AFAIK, UE had the fanciest and fastest software render. UT99 could do 9-12fps on moms Pentium 100Mhz, 32MB RAM, with one bot, on smaller maps. It shouldn't even run but somehow, it almost was playable. Best arena shooter ever made no doubt.
Interesting topic. I must confess I've never really tried -- I always try to use the best hardware I have to maximize the results. :)
But yeah this is interesting, and obviously can provide quite a different look'n'feel. I've got to investigate this further, hehe. Cheers Phil!
I want to revisit again with a faster Core 2 and push the resolution ☺️
@@philscomputerlab yep my thoughts too - I'm gonna play around with my E8600 and see how it works. :D
MDK was a really good looking 3d software rendered game
i remember the jump from software to accelerated, i was dissapointed textures were the same but smooth
Good morning Phil, enjoy your coffee bro. ;-)
Thank you 😊
My first 3D accelerator was a ATI Rage IIc that was built into the motherboard of a socket 7 system with a Cyrix MII @ 333Mhz. It could only do up to Direct3D 5 with no support for OpenGL. There were very few games that used Direct3D 5, so it wasn't that useful. However, it did have DirectDraw acceleration which helped for some games. Eventually, I was able to upgrade to a AMD K6-2 CPU and a Nvidia Vanta, making it a nice gaming system.
Does the left arm of the chracter in Rune show through the body in software mode? Or is the character really running that weird with their arm behind the back?
I remember the ahaa moment when I fire up unreal for the first time on my voodoo banshee