The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998’s Thief: The Dark Project (2011)
I find software 3D rendering really interesting, as somebody who works on indie games. GPU-accelerated rendering is obviously much faster and you can get much better results; but it does have drawbacks!<p>With GPU rendering, I spend the majority of my time testing and debugging on various platforms. 3D APIs are very complex, hardware capabilities vary a lot and driver quality is very poor. So even though you can get much better results in principle, in practice you <i>can&#x27;t</i> get it as good as you hoped (or at least I can&#x27;t) while also making it robust and reliable.<p>With software rendering, you needed a ton of effort (by really smart programmers like Barrett) to get viable results, but at least you had confidence that it would <i>work</i> on everybody&#x27;s computer, rather than crashing randomly on drivers that don&#x27;t implement a 300-page 3D spec correctly.<p>I&#x27;m told that Vulkan should improve matters, being simpler and better-specified than OpenGL, but I&#x27;m skeptical. It still seems very complex, and it doesn&#x27;t run everywhere yet so it&#x27;s not a great fit for low-end indie games.