From a performance perspective, admittedly. The software 3D renderer it is running is not highly optimized. But it&#x27;s probably not an apples-to-apples comparison, since this has programmable vertex&#x2F;pixel shaders that uses floating point for parameter interpolation and color values. I assume 486 class 3D renderers were probably taking some shortcuts (no shaders, fixed point math, etc.)<p>What I think it does demonstrate is that the hardware design can run a non-trivial programs reliably on FPGA. Maybe that&#x27;s not impressive either, but I thought it was kinda cool. :) While this doesn&#x27;t mean anyone needs to go shorting NVidia stock, it does allow anyone who is interested in CPU&#x2F;GPU architecture to experiment with and modify a full featured design (pipelined, vector floating point, L1 &amp; L2 caches, hardware multithreading).<p>I analyzed the basic performance and scalability of the 3D renderer here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;latchup.blogspot.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;improved-3d-engine-profile.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;latchup.blogspot.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;improved-3d-engine-profi...</a><p>And dove a bit deeper into performance using a custom Quake level renderer:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;latchup.blogspot.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;not-so-fast.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;latchup.blogspot.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;not-so-fast.html</a>