Uh.......... all of them? Software acceleration isn't acceleration (unless Abrash coded it 😉 ). The few D3D 5/6 games that offer a "MMX" mode is just really slow rasterization.

ok, so
name a few most popular/best examples of
Win9x/Me only games that don't work on other OSes
meaning DOS/Win3.1/XP/XP+
and don't have software handled Direct3d mode?
Excluding proprietary APIs only games (meaning glide/etc.)

Tigershark?

Monstertruck Madness 2 comes to my mind.

... I haven't tried, if it works on XP+, but it's definitely Win95 era game, that had software mode and accelerated modes. (If i still remember correctly 😀 )

Tigershark's acceleration modes:
- none
- MMX
- 3DFX
Two of them (none and MMX) are software 😀

GigAHerZ without software mode 😀

My guess is:
All DirectX 1-6 games support at least one software rendering mode.
All DirectX 7-9 games that don't support at least one software rendering mode work in WinXp too.

robertmo wrote:

My guess is:
All DirectX 1-6 games support at least one software rendering mode.
All DirectX 7-9 games that don't support at least one software rendering mode work in WinXp too.

I think technically all DirectX 1-8 games support software rendering, since there was a software renderer included by default (the 'none' and 'MMX' options you mention are default software implementations provided by Microsoft).
The only way to not 'support' it is to specifically filter out the software devices when enumerating devices. You should be able to patch that back in.

In DirectX 9, the default software renderer was removed (or was it DirectX 8 already? Not entirely sure. Edit: just checked, the flag is still there in D3D8, but it is listed as 'unsupported'). There was still a "reference rasterizer", but that was only available to developers.
It was also aimed at accuracy, not performance, so playing games wasn't really a possibility with it.

Then with Direct3D 10.1, the WARP software rasterizer was introduced, which basically brings us back to the early versions of DirectX: the software device is always supported by any Windows installation, and it is the choice of the developer to allow the user to select it or not. It shouldn't be difficult to patch games to force them to use the software renderer.

Scali wrote:

In DirectX 9, the default software renderer was removed (or was it DirectX 8 already? Not entirely sure. Edit: just checked, the flag is still there in D3D8, but it is listed as 'unsupported').

according to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

8.0a 4.08.00.0400 (RC14) February 5, 2001 Last supported version for Windows 95 and last version to have software rendering support in dxdiag.exe

So 8.1 that came with WinXP may be the first without it.

Dxdiag losing a software test != losing software rendering