Hi Doc! I share your point of view. 🙂
When I was playing Windows games in the 90s, I had no access to accelerators but faster CPUs.
In Windows, up to incl. Windows 98SE or DX 6.1, the software-renderer had been always an alternative.
A good 2D card with DDraw support was then assisting in blitting the rendered images asap to the screen..

It was starting with DX 7 that games demanded for a hardware renderer.
Much much later, with Windows 8 or so, the software renderer got upgraded again to allow things like Aero Glass without a powerful GPU.

Thx Jo22, to me the lack of detail vs. the stutterfree smoothnes is a problem.

Lack of Detail:
- the early bilininear filtering is much worse than today, especially on small resolutions like 400x300/512x384. So I prefer software-rendering
- also lack of colours/contrast

Smoothness:
- that point goes to the 3d-acc. => here I am talking about the moving sky in doom etc. It stutters on software, but on 3D it's really smooth.

Performance:
- As I said, Hellbender on Software (K6-2/450) is MUCH! better as with Hardware-Acc. on RageIIc (Biliniar Filtering is always on and kill's performance; or PCX1 (freezes)

Doc

Since you mentioned Tomb Raider, that game definitively looks much nicer with 3D acceleration.

Software rendering limits you to a 256 color palette which results in visible banding. Even the S3D accelerated version on the humble Virge will give you 16-bit colors, perspective correction and bilinear filtering. A few months ago I put up some screenshots for comparison here.

Thx, the point is, if the game supports a special (early) api that my gfx-card supports, it's of course much better then using software-rendering.
Bilinear-filtering is a thing I am not 100% sure if I like it or not.
If the game textures are "optimized" for 3D and bilinear-filtering, than the lack of detail and colors are not so dramatric and therfore OK.
But if not, the lack of detail and colors are so big, that it looks like an ugly smearing of mud.
On the very early stuff in lowres, sharper and more colorfull textures are better to my eyes.

Doc

The PCX1 has no bilinear filtering, but Tomb1(PVR) looks brilliant on it.

There's an accelerated ROTT?

rott32 and winrott /winrottgl exist. But at least not usable for a machine-type I use (k6/2-450/Win95B/DX5)

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-10-05, 09:00:

Even the S3D accelerated version on the humble Virge will give you 16-bit colors, perspective correction and bilinear filtering.

Bilinear filtering pretty much kills the performance on that card, disabling this will improve the situation. Few games has the option to disable it and I'm not fan of S3D though.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-10-05, 09:37:

Bilinear-filtering is a thing I am not 100% sure if I like it or not. If the game textures are "optimized" for 3D and bilinear- […]
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Bilinear-filtering is a thing I am not 100% sure if I like it or not.
If the game textures are "optimized" for 3D and bilinear-filtering, than the lack of detail and colors are not so dramatric and therfore OK.
But if not, the lack of detail and colors are so big, that it looks like an ugly smearing of mud.
On the very early stuff in lowres, sharper and more colorfull textures are better to my eyes.

I second this, in most cases bilinear filtering on very old games makes them look blurry due to the low resolution of textures at the time. That's why I prefer software renderer for these games despite being limited to 256 colors in many cases and requiring more CPU grunt for better performance at high resolutions.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-10-06, 21:49:

Bilinear filtering pretty much kills the performance on that card, disabling this will improve the situation.

On the original Virge, sure. But on the DX version, the performance impact is not as drastic, especially if you overclock it.

Reducing the resolution to 512x384 can help even further and it makes the S3D version of Tomb Raider somewhat playable (15-20 FPS on average). Not great, but not too bad either considering that software rendering in 640x480 runs at around 10-12 FPS on period correct machines (e.g. Pentium MMX 166).