I know software rendering is nearly dead in the gaming industry, but I''d like to hear your opinions about my new demo: http://softwire.sourceforge.net/extra.html Think there''s a future for software rendering now CPU''s are getting fast enough for things like bilinear filtering? My next project will feature efficient ps 2.0 emulation...

Very impressive, but it would have been nice to see some more of the features your engine supports (radial fog etc). So please let us know when we can see a more comprehensive demo

Got some texture loading errors in the debug log..

==== Debug Log File ==== Sat Apr 12 19:44:04 2003Unable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\textures\common\mirror1.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\textures\common\mirror1.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\proto_addition 11\08\99.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\textures\common\invisible.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\proto_addition 11\08\99.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\textures\common\mirror1.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\.jpgUnable to open file: C:\Downloads\RealVirtuality\Quake 3\textures\common\mirror1.jpg 

It averaged 20fps on a P4 3Ghz, XP Pro.

- Matt

quote:Original post by matibee
Very impressive, but it would have been nice to see some more of the features your engine supports (radial fog etc). So please let us know when we can see a more comprehensive demo

Got some texture loading errors in the debug log..

I''m currently working hard on the ps 2.0 emulator so I probably won''t update the Q3 map renderer soon. It''s just a tech demo showing the possibilities of soft-wiring technology. Only in the second place it''s a 3D renderer.

Don''t worry about the error messages. Those textures are either non-existing or not found in the .shader files (my parsing isn''t complete).

quote:Original post by CGameProgrammer
Software rendering is fun to write, but I wouldn''t bother doing bilinear filtering. In the screenshots you don''t appear to be drawing any more polygons than Quake uses, yet your framerate is lower than Quake would''ve gotten even in 1996. Of course that game''s renderer is highly optimized but also it uses no texture filtering.

Quake III scenes are actually not suited for software rendering because there''s lots of overdraw that only a hardware z-buffer can fully handle. The number of polygons really isn''t such a limiting factor when using an SSE optimized vertex pipeline and clipper.

Besides bilinear filtering, the original Quake also didn''t have per-pixel mipmapping (it had cheap per-poly mipmapping), it didn''t have per-pixel perspective correction (it used sub-affine correction every 16 pixels) and it even didn''t have multi-texturing (lightmapping was done by statically blending them with the base texture and caching). I''m certainly not saying that Quake had a bad software renderer. It definitely did some impressive work on those old processors. It''s just hard to compare it with my renderer. Whereas Quake''s inner loop took just six clock cycles, mine takes about 100 to do everything at this high detail.

I could also have used point sampling, per-poly mipmapping, sub-affine perspective correction and static lightmapping to reach higher framerates, but then it would have looked like just another ordinary software renderer. Besides, this demo is meant as a proof-of-concept for soft-wiring, which wouldn''t have had much use without these special features...