Re-discovering 3D Graphics the Way Early Games Did (www.youtube.com)
from ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to programming@programming.dev on 26 Jan 2026 23:23
https://slrpnk.net/post/33350010

#programming

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FishFace@piefed.social on 27 Jan 2026 11:25 next collapse

Ah man, this makes me think of a similar process I went through trying to work out how to do 3D drawing in WinAmp AVS… People (other than me) did some crazy stuff in that very limited system!

partner_boat_slug@mander.xyz on 29 Jan 2026 03:27 collapse

CPUs nowadays are fast enough to render 3D graphics in real time?

[deleted] on 29 Jan 2026 04:35 next collapse
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ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net on 29 Jan 2026 04:35 collapse

Sure, and they were back in the day too. Games like Quake (and others around that era) had the option of rendering in software using the CPU if the user didn’t have a GPU. On slower systems it wasn’t a very enjoyable experience, but an OG Pentium at 75mhz was enough to make it playable.

Nowadays modern games don’t usually have software renderers built in, so it’s difficult to know how much graphics you could push with purely a modern CPU.

partner_boat_slug@mander.xyz on 29 Jan 2026 04:39 collapse

I wonder: Server CPUs can have like 10+ cores, if compilers can optimize rasterization and transformations to become really fast … but yeah requiring an average user to have this system is pretty expensive lol.

LLVMpipe to my understanding is GPU emulation on CPU on Linux.

ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net on 29 Jan 2026 04:43 collapse

I actually just stumbled across this video of a modern software renderer that can leverage modern multicore CPU’s, and it’s pretty impressive.