squareguy wrote:

I actually prefer Quake in software vs hardware... maybe i'm just nuts hehe.

No you're not. Quake has this nice desaturated feel when stuck through a imprecise colormap, this feel is even retained when you put it through colored lighting as long as it's a software renderer. It's why I never took it to 15/16/24/32bpp rendering (plus, going that way would lose the colorshift/gammaramp effects with the palette, requiring to slowly read every pixel and writing instead).

I forgot that Quake 2 had the option to use a software renderer. It looks amazingly good. It is hard to compare to my memory because back when it was new there were no CPU's powerful enough to run it at high resolutions in software mode and have any sort of playable framerate. Seeing it at 1024x768 in software looks great. It doesn't have colored lighting (like in OpenGL mode) but I bet that isn't a technical limitation but a choice made to make the software renderer run faster. It is not nearly as moody as Quake 1 is but it looks good.

I would love to see what a modern CPU is capable of doing for a software rendered game engine built to use its capabilities. I cannot put my finger on it but there is just something about a game rendered in software that I prefer. I remember the first time I saw Tombraider and Quake running on a Voodoo 1 video card and my jaw dropped, but back then you had to have 3D acceleration to get higher resolutions and acceptable frame rates. The true benefit I can see for a modern Software rendered engine would be that it wouldn't have to be 'stuck' to any particular API. Just my incoherent ramblings.

GPUs are really just chips designed to do parts of software rendering extremely well. And they keep getting more programmable and CPU-like. So really the distinction of software/hardware rendering is blurring.

UT2004 includes a software renderer called Pixomatic. It can be enabled in the UT2004.ini. It looks quite similar to hardware rendering. There's also a more modern software renderer called Swiftshader. And of course you can look up games that use voxel rendering (ie Voxelstein) because that can't really be done on current GPUs.