What game are you planning to run on a Soft Renderer?

kinda

Swiftshader was once a thing covering DX9 in software but that's been eaten and spat around corporately.

If I am not wrong, there's a Windows port of Mesa 3d

You need to define "fast computer with no real 3D accelerator", for us. We can't give you a specific answer without a more specific question.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-08, 09:45:

Is there a wrapper to play old DirectX or OpenGL games with a fast computer with no real 3D accelerator?

Only thing is TitaniumGL.

My goolefu did not give me any straight answers.

SwiftShader

More completely:

Since modern versions of SwiftShader can run on Vulkan API, (and provide useful D3D8 and D3D9 implementations as drop-in dlls-- Just put a ".local" file in the game directory, and put the SwirftShader DLLs into the game's exe folder), D3D8 and D3D9 games can use it straight up.

To get DGVoodoo2 to use it, you would need to pair it with DXVK for windows, so that DXVK can grab SwiftShader's Vulkan implementation, then provide D3D10 and D3D11 interfaces, which DGVoodoo2 needs. (Though, you could probably just use the WARP driver in DGVoodoo2 instead. It is a "Provided by microsoft" software fallback stack for D3D10/11, and should always be available if DirectX10/11 is installed.)

I used to abuse old versions of swiftshader to get "At least some resemblence" of D3D support for an old laptop that had ONLY 2D capable video hardware (NeoMagic MagicGraph). It could "Sorta" do 3D games that way, very slowly.

It used to be buyware with a nag watermark. (I learned that the watermark was just a 24 bit bitmap embedded in the DLL, and was easily hex-edited to be all transparent pixels. Shhhh.. But recent versions are FOSS, as linked above.)

Trying to run games with Windows XP and Tulatin 1400 and a integrated Blade3D(no real 3D capability). Unreal and Quake2 and Half-Life have integrated software renderer and work like a charm. But few later games do not. I hoped to use some universal solution but they all are dirt slow in this setup. So no go. Tested games were GTA3 and CnC Renegade and RTCW. Got dirt low FPS with TitaniumGL.

Actually the Blade3D is a real 3d accelerator and does DX6 and GL and can do about 25fps in Quake 2 GL.
There is no reason to try and use a wrapper with this, as that would actually make it even slower, since your doing an extra layer of processing with the API's, that is not necessary.

The Blade3D is about half the speed of a Riva TNT or a Voodoo 2. It was completely lowend tier.
Honestly going down a hole that is not needed. Drop in something like a Nvidia Geforce 2 MX.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-08, 20:38:

Tulatin 1400

A software renderer driver ain't going to speed up 2002's struggling PC games on a 2001 processor...

Yep realized that it was a pipe dream. Only tried it because i got Quake2/Unreal T/Half-Life software mode with butter smooth 640x480 and even 800x600. And only 320x240 playable and looking like crap in Blade3D accelerated mode.

At least it plays all not accelerated games in 9x/XP era butter smooth. So an RTS and platformer machine mainly. And good DOS compadibility with VIA BIOS enabled legacy audio. Dual boot Windows XP/MS-DOS 7.10 Windows 3.1 in one FAT32 partition.

I came into the thread expecting someone trying to use their Threadripper to run DX9 games in software mode; found someone trying to use a Tualatin 1400 to run DX7 stuff in software more. I mean, you do realize why GPUs existed in circa 2000 right? That's because the contemporary CPUs could not handle 3D graphics in the first place. A Tualatin 1400 can barely run Build games in hi-res VESA modes, so there's that.

Well, the afore-mentioned swiftshader could run skyrim (OG PC version) on an old 5th gen I5, with 16gb of RAM. Poorly.

I did it as a joke to see if it would do it. Sure enough, it could.

I agree though, you would need at LEAST two cores to even ATTEMPT this with a classic era computer. One core JUST for using swiftshader (using manual affinities), and the other for "Everything else". Unless this was a dual tualatin build (IIRC, there WERE some motherboards for that) this is pretty much out of the question.

By the way. I am a total idiot. I forgot that those integrated XP video drivers only had Direct3D but not OpenGL. So a fresh install on VIA Blade XP drivers from vogonsdrivers really solved all those problems.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-10, 08:43:

By the way. I am a total idiot. I forgot that those integrated XP video drivers only had Direct3D but not OpenGL. So a fresh install on VIA Blade XP drivers from vogonsdrivers really solved all those problems.

Happy to see this resolved 😀 Blade XP is not a fantastic accelerator but it will do the job for most things impressively for an integrated solution of the time.

I remember that it has an issue with Build games though, I think it caused graphical corruption in Duke3D for example, which is a shame.

Some of these boards would otherwise have made great all in one compact mATX dos/9x machines..