Fun Fact: Croc was made as a demo for a 3D Yoshi's Island game. Unfortunately Nintendo went with another developer, so they retooled it and we have Croc. Glad they did too. It was a great game in it's time and holds up quite well.

I love playing Quake with its software renderer. The shadows are so much deeper and the atmosphere is more moody than when it's played with 3D acceleration. And when I play it on a 2GHZ+ Athlon, I can crank that resolution up really high and it looks awesome, haha.

I played Carmageddon, Moto Racer, NFS 1 & 2 SE, TR, WC98, FIFA 98,99 all in Software render on my 100Mhz Pentium back then. Redline Racer was the first game that I couldn't run due to the need of a 3d card.

I wrote several software renderers back in the days. For my last engine creation, I was still using software rendering exclusively long after hardware 3D got popular, because it interested me more. I finally gave in and added hardware support to it, but kept the software renderer. In fact, it's still in there, now upped to 24 bit color, texture filtering, mip mapping and multi-threading support. It's still useful for some quick and dirty stuff that runs on everything including older machines with out of date drivers.

I love the crunchy pixels, it would be great to see a modern game in software mode!

My first video card was an S3 Trio, so software renderer was pretty much all I could play with. Of course, I played Doom, but my favorite was the Heretic and Hexen games.

Croc! I loved that game so much. Reminds me of my 2nd youngest. He had this in his room for a while. He used to play Croc all the time. It was his entry to video games. Now he's 24 years old. Just graduated college and is working as a FedEx delivery man. Time flies. I'm going to cry now lol.

Not gonna lie, really love those crunchy pixels 😅 They have a charm of their own. Whenever i fire up the original Quake, I play it in software mode. Even with Doom, i ise a modern source port (ZDoom) but even then i play with the original software renderer, just taking advantage of the widescreen resolution. That's the setup that feels "right" to me

The biggest difference in Q2 is that there is no multi-colored lightmaps in software renderer. I remember, it was a pretty big deal back then. Same thing with HL2 and Hexen II afaik. Unreal, though, had colored lightmaps even in software mode, which was actually pretty cool. Rune and CB's Undying also, since they are on Unreal 1 engine.

In 1997 I added a diamond monster 3d with to my cyrix 120+ and it was the best experience with quake and tombraider. Back then it was nearly impossible to play those games in software rendering and in higher resolution than 320x240

I ditched software rendering when I saw Quake OpenGL. I was hooked!

Back in the day, I remember playing Mortal Kombat 4 softwere mode. When I saw the 3d rendered game, I was: WOW. Huge grapghics change! But the gameplay was the same, so after all, softwere render still brings that fun and joy of those retro games. Great video, Phill.

If you revisit this topic, consider including Outcast -- 100% Voxels, software rendering only.

not to forget: Warzone 2100, Machines by Acclaim, Colin McRae Rally ...

Software rendering was too slow as I recall. But I guess it’s easier easier now with much faster CPUs than the Pentium 2 I had.

Software was the only way to write a program once & run it anywhere. Now supporting every hardware feature almost requires a complete rewrite for every GPU.

I think Dark Forces II was the first FPS I played that I really got into. It is still one of my favorite PC games, and I would argue it's one of the best Star Wars games ever made. The 3D acceleration doesn't work on modern Windows, though. It's fine without it, but it would be nice to get it working.

What's funny is that Linux has a fallback software rendered Vulkan driver in case the GPU installed doesn't support Vulkan, and it's hilarious seeing modern games being ran through it. what's even more funny is that they recently added ray-tracing support to the software driver.

FIFA (and all EA sports) and NFS and Carmageddon were already mentioned, so, I would add Resident Evil 3, Moto Racer 1 and 2, Ignition, POD, Blood 2: The Chosen, Thief 1 and 2, even Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, Actua Soccer 3, Mortal Kombat 4, CART Precision Racing, Counterstrike, Deus Ex, Destruction Derby 2, Test Drive (4?), Delta Force 2 (I don't think that the 1st had 3D acceleration) and some of the other Novalogic games at the time like Tachyon: The Fringe, Diablo 2 had some 3D support, Descent 2 was patched for various 3D APIs, Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2, Sin, Hexen 2, Heretic 2, Homeworld, Requiem: Avenging Angel.

Thanks for giving some love to Software Rendering :)

Thanks for another great video, always looking forward for the next one

Another superb quality video. Phil, thank You for the MS-DOS "menu" that You created in the past. It's just perfect. Along with additional smartdrv and other stuff gives us a tremendous msdos environmnet. THANK YOU!

I remember being excited about Unreal when I upgraded my system to an AMD K6-2 300, as it used 3DNow! for the software renderer, giving you reflective surfaces, but it was so much slower than proper 3D acceleration it felt like it was a tech demo, rather than something usable. I was actually kind of mad that I couldn't combine 3DNow! with the Voodoo3 3500 card I was using at the time, since that was one of the selling points that caused me to choose AMD over Intel, misunderstanding the usefulness.

Would be interesting to see if you can get a semi period-accurate build to get UT 2004's software mode to a playable state!

UT99 in software looks great, very raw looking. Not necessarily pixelated, just raw. Engine was remarkable on how fast it was with software render. I prefer its look to 3D accelerated, but it's not fast enough for todays standard.

Software rendered 90's games was how i played most of my early games until i upgraded my P60 to a P166mhz and got my first 2D/3D accelerator card, the Matrox Mystique. I still prefer the software render to this day, especially the lack of shadows in game.

Shogoooooo! "Be careful, Sanjuro. They know you're coming." "Great! Then they'll know who killed 'em!"

You can disable texture filtering with a command on the modern Steam version of Half-Life so that the textures (and especially blood decals) look authentic.

Voodoo is nice, but not with todays pricing tag. GF 4MX/5xxx/6xxx, ATI 9250/9550/9600 are excellent choices, even capable run of early WinXP games. HW or SW - I think its more of personal. I prefer HW with filtered textures, and even with AF/AA.

That's cool !! 😁 For me OpenLara GBA is the fifth essence of software rendered 3D graphics on the Game Boy Advance 😍

“Croc, The Legend of Gobbos” is a part of my childhood and I have good memories with it! But it didn’t run well in software mode using a K6-II 350 MHz, 32MB of RAM and integrated graphics from SiS (which theft 4MB of RAM).

In the late 2000s when I had a dying graphics card and had no money to buy a new one, games and console emulators that supported software rendering helped my kid self quite a lot. It also was my first introduction to many great retro games. Thank you for reminding me of that era!

I can also remember the good old software renderer very well. It always required a powerful CPU. People used to make fun of people who used something like that... "there you are again with your office crap".... But I can imagine that at some point it will go back in that direction and graphics will be taken over by AI or special software renderers in order to save on the hardware mode that is very energy-hungry today. Without hardware you would save space, energy, heat generation and production costs for complex graphics. It would be a bit like streaming where the end device only outputs the finished image.

Most of us had a Pentium or PentiumII for Windows 98 back then, that Atholon CPU came out much later, we could only wish for those resolutions and fps your reporting during that period.

Don't forget Outcast with its software voxel renderer, and all the 3D games on the Game Boy Advance!!

One game you might want to check out is Outcast from 1999, which has a very impressive software renderer. It combines a voxel heightmap with polygonal models similar to later Comanche games.

When it comes to software rendering, it's always interesting to see games that do things that hardware rendering couldn't - like the large voxel-based environments in Outcast. It's also really cool to check out some of the demoscene stuff like, well, basically anything from Federation Against Nature.

Thanks for sharing Phil!

I'm quite fond of the crisp software rendering. When texture filtering came in with the new fangled 3d cards, some games I felt looked a little "muddy" and soft.

There were also some games (like P.O.D.) that supported "MMX acceleration" without 3D graphics card. 16-bit color, filtering and other effects were very basic, the FPS was low, but the user could try real 3D using only the CPU. Could be intersting to review such a topic.

Every time You say "I used to play this back in the day.....", my heart starts beating faster. I remember playing these games on my cousins Pentium 1 75Mhz with some graphics and then a Celeron 533 and eventually got a Pentium 3 800 from junk in 2003.

It's kind of ironic: Back when 3D games were new, using a 3D card would give you the best, sharpest graphics, and software rendering would often be blockier with rougher textures. Now, if you run an emulator for a console that had 3D hardware in it, like the PS2, setting it to software rendering will give you the most accurate graphics, while using a 3D card for rendering, often has graphical glitches.

Great job making this video I really enjoy it! I'm a big fan of late 90s and early 2000s pc gaming; because it's what I grew up with. Currently my retro pc is an 'acer-aspire' "one zg8" with windows xp (sp3 2002) that I'm still configuring to get my 32bit library working (finding drivers on internet archive). This makes me want a desktop lol.

I didn't know about graphics cards because there were no KZfaqrs to teach me about it back in 2005. I thought I needed more ram to play need for speed. Good times.

I've played quake 1 an 2 onde software render

I recall playing Independence War in software mode, it was impressive it was really well done, most of the time I could not notice major difference to hardware accelerated version. It was also much easier to setup in software mode. Really cool space sim.

I am a great fan of early 3D-games. Fascinating to see how they worked around the limitations and pushed the boundaries.

I remember when the MMX versions of the INTEL chips hit. Finally allowing for bilinear filtering. Issue was those came out just as 3DFX really was taking over all of gaming. So no one cared. Pod, MDK being some of the first taking advantage of MMX. Unreal’s software engine I think is the climax of software engines of that era. It was doing some brilliant FX all in software.

I didn’t have good experience with early ATI Rage 3D cards: nice on advertisement, magazine ads, but not really operational in reallity. I recall the promise to run Quake 2 on it but didn’t manage back in the day. Evertyhing changed when 3dfx came, and that was my first “real 3D” graphic card. Unreal is still today the game I use to demonstrate software vs hardware rendering: it was “unreal” at that time, and Glide specially shined. I was so sad when 3dfx tanked…. I still keep my Voodoos 2, 3, 5 around, don’t use then much as they cannot be replaced, as you pointed out.

I rembember how different Midtown Madness 1 looked on my Matrox MGA Mystique, on an ATI Rage and on software render, often on a NeoMagic MagicGraph.

Cool, I remember so well all those great nights spent playing Quake2 or UT99 deatmatch or Duke Nukem 3D or Carmaggeddon. All those games were so fun and the software renderers were perfectly fine.. The good thing about software renderer is that those games were easy to run on later pc's even without 3D gfx cards.

The majority of people would have experienced those very early 3D games exclusively in software rendered mode. The 3D acceleration market really started to take off in a very serious way in 1999 and absolutely exploded in 2000, when it became essential for any PC build that took gaming into consideration. I remember Quake 3 being the first game that outright required a 3D acceleration card and would not work without one.

Interesting video, thanks mate, saludos!

I was pretty early on hardware acceleration as I had a voodoo II in my Mac (there were dozens of us!) and I was able to get PowerMac g4 and a Radeon 9600 Pro. For me software mode was the thing you did when you didn’t have a GPU, but is we the appeal as all of us remember games as we played them. I was lucky to have a voodoo 2.

CROC! Thanks a lot for reminding me of this game. Man I used to play this a lot but completely forgot

I played Star Trek Armada in Safe Mode (software) for a couple years until dad got me a Rage 128 Pro PCI; so much better :)

I was waiting to see UT 2004, one of (if not) the last games to ship with a built-in software renderer. This was at a time when 3D accelerators were pretty ubiquitous, of course, so I remember being quite surprised. Likewise, it was more of a curiosity, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Nice! You showed Shogo, exactly where you got stuck :)

Thanks for sharing.

My computer renders Phil's videos with ease! Because they're the best!

All of the games aside from the last 2 were some of my favourites as a kid, what an awesome time to be a gamer.

6:34 For some reason I thought one of Unreal's selling points was that it didn't require a 3D accelerator, turns out I was thinking of Unreal Tournament. "DOES NOT REQUIRE INTERNET ACCESS OR A 3D CARD" (I guess because Quake III REQUIRED an OpenGL 3D Card and it came out a month after UT)

I very much missed Extreme Assault, an incredibly good looking arcade helicopter shooter by Blue Byte of Siedler fame. The best way to play it was - of course - via 3DFX Glide, but it also had a very decent software renderer with support for extremely impressive alpha effects. I haven't played it in ages, but i fondly remember it for its impressive graphics, solid gameplay, and absolutely awesome redbook audio soundtrack by the one and only Chris Hülsbeck.

Ahh back in the days of just having integrated graphics, I recall saving up for two years to buy GTA Vice City. As Australia had it rated for mature 14+ but here in NZ it was 18+ (I was 14 at the time). Got it home so excited to play it, only to find our Compaq with a Celeron and Intel 815 graphics ran at 1-2fps outside of the spawn point haha. Loved playing Croc as well, it ran quite well in Software mode on a Toshiba 330 CDS a friend had, despite the terrible DTSN display

I only play old DOS games with chunky pixels. All these games you mentioned I played on our Win98 build with an AGP 3D accelerated configuration, mostly played them in OpenGL, maybe some of them in D3D mode.

Motorhead. It is a racing game what had a very good software renderer at the time when games more and more practically required at least a voodoo card.

I have a couple of the none voodoo cards mentioned. However Software rendering doesn't sound so bad after all. Croc and Viking games looked interesting. Glad you showcased some other games as I'm kind of stuck in a rut and not sure what to play!

Unreal Tournament also supports software render, as well as open GL and Direct 3D. It also has the same texture dithering effect you saw in Unreal if I remember correctly. I played it on a 400mhz windows 98 IBM desktop, those were desperate times.

I like the look of software rendered games. Laser Arena I always play that in Software mode.

I miss those early days, my first 3D accelerator was the Matrox Mystique, it had a whopping 2mb of vram! Man, we had so many choices of GPU's back then, Virge 3d, 3dFX, Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, PowerVR, Rendition Verite.

Software render on Quake 2, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament was a godsend for those of us with an S3 Virge 3D Decelerator :D

I like software rendered 3D. I'm actually writing my own software rendered 3D engine.

These days even getting a lesser known 3dfx Voodoo Banshee sets you back at least around $100, and it isn't even a card able to render later Win98 DX 7 titles since the drivers only (officially) support up to DX 6.0 . Since the primary advantage is speed ( though anti-aliasing and transparent textures do look nice ), using the software renderer or opengl or a glide wrapper probably has become the best choice - provided you got yourself a fast system where you got CPU performance to spare. My best recommendation for an AGP graphics card for that time period still is a ATI Radeon 9200 / 9250, because it can be had for around $10 and simply works on most boards for most games. As for PCI you can't really go wrong with the S3 Phil defaults to, but there are more powerful alternatives: The Nvidia Riva 128ZX ( around $100 ), or better yet the Sapphire Ati Radeon 7000 PCI ( around $25, and be careful to not get an AGP version ). Going VLB, it probably would be a simple Cirrus Logic GD542X for around $40 ( avoid the Tseng ET4000, because it's about as expensive as a Voodoo ). And with ISA, there really only is the one: Trident 9000. Not that is fast, or can do high resolutions. As a matter of fact, avoid ISA graphics cards if you can. But this one cost around $40 and simply works. Oh and fair warning: Any ISA, most VLB and some early PCI graphics cards require loading a VESA bios for full video mode support beyond 320x200 ( if you got the VRAM ).

The first game where I ever saw 3D acceleration with my own eyes was Monster Truck Madness. It looked cool, but it ran slow (S3 Virge). That's when I knew the software render was coming to an end.

I love the pixelated look on 3D games as well. Tomb Raider, Quake, Croc, Half-Life was those games that in the beginning there was no other way to play software mode. Later yes, we upgraded to a 3dfx voodoo card and got faster and smooth graphics. But i still can play those games in software mode ;-)

Back in the day (1997) for me it was cheaper to upgrade my Pentium 75 Setup with a Voodoo 1; played Tomb Raider, Half Life and GTA and had a blast. At this time the raw look of software rendering without filtering was a no go for me xD Also the experience was much smoother. But i like your perspective. But to be realistic: to play later games in software mode you need CPUs that there very expensive or not released at the release of some games (anyone remember Trespasser...okay...this was sometimes only playable in software mode).

I used to play Half-Life in software mode sometimes because I always find the textures a bit blurry for my taste, plus the water had a nice looking effect on them (very similar to the distortion effect you could applied to texture on Unreal engine). But generally speaking I think I will always love that crunchy pixel look that games from the 90s used to had. Software mode rules !

Newer versions of Windows include a Direct3D software renderer - if you install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a machine with an unsupported GPU, Aero Glass still works (on later versions it isn't as noticeable due to the Metro design).

I wonder what ever happened to my 3DFX Voodoo 2 Graphic Card :) I do remember spending a great deal on my first Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 back in the day when they were brand new.

Software mode actually had a lot of pros against hardware acceleration. It just couldn’t do texture filtering hence the pixelation and it was worse performance.

i m absolutly love the pixelated look! need for speed 2, half life, quake, quake 2 are the games that come in my mind when thinking about that time.

I remember this golden age very well, started gaming in 1994 on 486s, Pentium and Athlon CPU between 1996 to 2002. You defintely forget to mention those fps games like Goldeneye or Duke Nukem 3D which both looked awesome in Software mode (although there has been no hardware accelerated version) Props for the video, the chosen system is awesome! ❤😊

Good morning Phil, enjoy your coffee bro. ;-)

I remember back in the late 1990s when I still had game news websites as my homepage, some game company employees announced they were working on a revolutionary new game engine that would make GPUs irrelevant............never heard anything else about it.

I was playing around with a student learner a former job. Tried to get a FarmingSim2021 Server running but failed at the client not supporting DX12. What did work was RDP to the server and run the game through that software renderer. Did not run very well with it being old v2 Xeons trimmed for Energy Efficiency. But it ran. Maybe even better with a more modern CPU for Software rendering.

Fun fact: There was a way to get 3d hardware style filtering in software mode for quake2.. I can't remember how but I managed to do this although my FPS went from 30 to about 2! Still, for a slideshow it looked pretty.

Great clip , thank you 😊 Edit: So, I was thinking, how good a solution is it for the CPU to calculate vertices and the gpu to calculate color for texture, or is that idea no longer applicable to today PC standards? Thx in advance 🫶

Quake 2 was the switch for me, I startet with software render in 512*384 on a Pentium 120 and added a voodoo 1 while playing it, to silky smooth 640*480 3DfxGL. That was huge step visualy. Not promoting my channel, but check out Dice's Motorhead (1998). Besides all kinds of 3D support it also has an amazing software renderer, which is able to display things some later 3D cards fail to show even. And yeah. late 90s 3D cards have gotten really expensive these days, even low end stuff like S3 Savage 4s. Crazy!

Played in software mode Q1, Q2, Unreal, Tomb Raider, Dark Forces, NFS on my P-II 333mhz, then i got TnT 2 pro and oh my....

At the end of the 90's the CPU and memory clockspeeds were going up so quickly that it wasn't really necessary to have a 3D accelerator, but I did have an Intel i740 and convinced myself that the texture filtering made it worth it, even though it wasn't making a lot of difference in terms of framerate. I believe the primary thing that made the GPU an ongoing gaming add-on was dedicated VRAM and the associated bandwidth. Everyone doing software rendering had to work hard to minimize the precision of textures and lighting, while the GPU hardware could just brute force through 32-bit calculations - it was a way to soak up transistor budgets. This meant that later on when Half-Life mods got heavier and started eating into RAM, I got less stuttering from using software mode, because it was actually able to still fit into what I had. The introduction of programmable shaders was kind of a nightmare because it walked away from the simpler API design of early OpenGL and catered towards the duopoly of Nvidia and ATI. I had the thought the other day that if I were back in freshman year of college in 2003, I might have, instead of trying to keep up with gaming and learn "modern graphics programming" of that era, built myself a software GPU with a second, networked computer stripped down to be a graphics terminal, and just explored what could be done by staying in 8-bit color depth and non-photorealistic rendering.

Half life plays great at 800x600 on my t420 windows 98 installation and the software rendering does an amazing job!

Back when Quake 2 was released, I remember having a Pentium 200 and needing to use software rendering to play it. It looked slow and ugly, and my biggest desire was a 3D accelerator. I didn't have much knowledge at that time and ended up buying a 4MB Creative 3D Blaster, which was rubbish and didn't allow me to play anything decently. It was a period of total frustration. However, I did play Quake 1 in software mode and enjoyed it without knowing that GLQuake existed at that time.

Interesting topic. I must confess I've never really tried -- I always try to use the best hardware I have to maximize the results. :) But yeah this is interesting, and obviously can provide quite a different look'n'feel. I've got to investigate this further, hehe. Cheers Phil!

It would be nice to see a comparison of these games in software vs. hardware rendering.

There are actually software vulkan and opengl renderers on linux, the vulkan one even recently got some support for ray tracing (it is of course extremely slow). They're mainly used for development and validation but you can actually use them render opengl, vulkan, (and directx via wine) games very slowly on the cpu.

I never really thought about running dos games on a more modern PC. I have a K6-2 non-plus, and I enjoy playing Screamer Rally, but even overclocked to 550 MHz, that chip struggles with that game. It'd be interesting to try and run it on my Pentium 4, I've got a 3.6 Prescott in there ATM. Would probably fly on it :D

I played NFS 3 in software mode for the longest time because I didn't know you could enable direct3D. I had a perfectly capable athlon 1333mhz and a geforce 256. the change to d3d was great, but software mode looks pretty good too.

Great and informative video. What do you think is going on in computer memory when it's running a game in software rendering mode? Do you think it's really just copying the entire 800x600 frame over the pci bus into the video card's vram 30-60 times per second or is it doing something else? 4mb of vram doesn't leave a lot of room for sophisticated gpu acceleration. If my math is correct, that would require a minimum of 57.6mb/s of expansion bus bandwidth if rendering 800x600 at 60fps in 16 bit high color mode (but realistically you'd need more bandwidth than that so the cpu has time to do other stuff). The maximum transfer speed on a non-overclocked isa slot under optimal conditions is 8.33mb/s. No wonder they switched to pci in the mid 90s.

_Tomb Raider III_ didn't have a software rendering mode, but had an emulated 3D card based on MMX instructions. Looks pretty much the same as hardware rendered mode, though you could turn off filtering to get the pixelated look. I recall it being an interesting way of doing software rendering, which was also useful if your hardware card didn't quite work properly. I had a Matrox M3D at the time, and I recall it ran faster with the PowerVR hardware mode than the emulated card, but had some graphical quirks in some situations. I fired it up just now in Windows 10, and the emulated card reached the 30fps engine limit at 1024x68. It dipped to the mid-20's at 1600x1200.

somehow i think that the first months after release of half-life 1 (nov 1998) i was still playing it in software mode. i can remember that i went from a matrox mystique directly to a voodoo 3 3000 agp (so i left out the add-in card voodoo 1 and 2 completely). just checked, the voodoo 3 came out in april 1999 so it must have been at least up until then that i used the mystique. now the question is if the 3d capabilities of the mystique would have even allowed me to choose the opengl or directx renderer of hl1. not quite sure if it had both at release as well, i think yes, while they removed directx somewhere in the late 2000s. i remember they had 3dfx glide. thinking back is really strange because when you see the dates and try to make a logic out of how you yourself MUST have played the games it sometimes feels so weird and you can't believe it yourself :)))))