I Love Software Rendering

I love software rendering. The best DOS experience I’ve had in a long while was Quake in its software renderer at 800×600, running at a locked 60fps on my Dell OptiPlex 380 . It’s one of the best-looking things I’ve seen a DOS game do.

That’s not how most people remember those games looking. In the 90s you either ran them in software at a low resolution, or you bought a 3D card and played the accelerated version. Today there’s a third option: run the software renderer on a machine fast enough to push it at resolutions nobody could use back then.

In a software-rendered game, the CPU draws every pixel. There’s no 3D card involved: the game works out each frame in its own code and writes it straight to video memory. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood and the original Quake all work this way.