News Summary

• In a software-rendered game, the CPU draws every pixel.
• Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood and the original Quake all work this way.
• Early 3D cards smoothed textures with bilinear filtering, which looked impressive in 1997 but turns everything soft and blurry to my eye now.
• Most of these games ran in 256 colours, with lighting done through lookup tables into that palette.
• Shadows fall off in visible steps rather than smooth gradients.
• Modern hardware can power through most of it.
• But the heaviest games still push even very fast machines.