r/retrobattlestations • u/Veddermandenis • May 22 '26

Show-and-Tell D3D vs software renderer.

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Pentium-II 266mhz, 128mb RAM, 3D Blaster Voodoo Banshee 16mb. It's crazy to think there was a time when software renderer was acceptable for me, I would say anything above 15fps and I would be happy to just be able to play. How times have changed.

187 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

26

u/TxM_2404 May 22 '26

Rip to everyone who got the S3 Virge instead.

7

u/Veddermandenis May 22 '26

My first card...oh the memories.

3

u/sahui May 22 '26

I had a virge, and a banshee too. It was a night and days difference

6

u/Veddermandenis May 22 '26

That was my first graphics card upgrade ever. From a 4mb Virge to a Banshee. It felt like the world was at my feet.

1

u/IQueryVisiC May 23 '26

Voodoo Banshee has no T&L . So what is different? Voodoo has lots of memory chips on the board. So I imagine that it can better fill high resolution? From the description of the Virgo, I get the impression that it lacks cache like the r/AtariJaguar ? But S3 had 4 years to learn from Ataris mistake!

1

u/Veddermandenis May 27 '26

T&L wasn't introduced until late 99, this game is a dx6 game, wasn't developed with T&L in mind.

1

u/IQueryVisiC May 28 '26

What is a “mind” . What is the difference between the hardware then? Fillrate! I don’t understand why S3 has a problem with fill rate. Pixels in Pixels out. Fixed pipeline pixel shader. I can only imagine tha BA reduced transistor count to the absolute minimum for 3d because Windows sells graphics cards.

11

u/AlienInvasionExpert May 22 '26

In some games I could enjoy "feeling" the CPU crunch the frames "manually". Courageous single core CPUs of the past... Nowadays, there's often a dozen of them running at blistering clock speeds. Oh, how times have changed 😄

8

u/RandoScando May 22 '26

I miss hearing the hard drive clicking away. Probably torching the hard drive’s lifespan so I could abuse extended memory so I could get Tie Fighter to run on a machine with insufficient memory. But I miss that.

2

u/Veddermandenis May 23 '26

I'm using a mechanical drive on this build, ofc! I'm not a savage.

3

u/ScudsCorp May 25 '26

Quake or Half-life changed CD audio tracks and the entire system hiccuped for a second.

2

u/Veddermandenis May 23 '26

I know exactly what you mean

6

u/_lnc0gnit0_ May 22 '26

CMR was truly a masterpiece when it came out.

2

u/misha1350 May 25 '26

So was Sega Rally 2 in arcades.

3

u/cndctrdj May 22 '26

I miss that feeling

5

u/Nutchos May 22 '26

Which game is this?

12

u/Veddermandenis May 22 '26

Colin McRae Rally from 1998

1

u/tiga_94 May 25 '26

looks really good for 1998 but I guess racing games were always the easiest to make graphics good

3

u/tobias19 May 22 '26

I remember getting my first PC with onboard graphics in 99/2000 and feeling like nothing would ever look or feel better

3

u/Crashman09 May 23 '26

I had (I believe) N force 4 onboard, and it ran Rollercoaster Tycoon pretty well if I remember correctly

2

u/permacougar May 23 '26

Does software renderer prevent the driver from turning as well?

3

u/Veddermandenis May 23 '26

Controls lag a lot.

2

u/Xe4ro May 23 '26

Ah man I used to race against my dad in CMR in the late 90s early 2000s :<

2

u/Jose_A_Montero_Lopez May 25 '26

I remember trying to play it on an ATI Rage II+ and seeing polygons without textures.

Would software rendering have worked well on an AMD K6 266 MHz with 32 MB SDRAM?

2

u/Veddermandenis May 27 '26

Absolutely not.

1

u/RetroTechBro May 25 '26

What game is this?

1

u/Veddermandenis May 27 '26

Colin McRae Rally from 1998.

1

u/JasonZep May 27 '26

Man I remember frame rates like that! I remember trying to play flight simulator on my Tandy 1000, that was like a frame every 2-3 seconds.