Agreed, and also: what's with the obsession with filling every possible gap in stories, leaving nothing to the imagination?
I remember when the Butlerian Jihad and the Clone Wars from Star Wars were complete mysteries. We readers and watchers were left mostly with our imaginations. My own feelings about the Clone Wars, mentioned off hand in the original Star Wars, turned out to be way better than the pedestrian stuff that George Lucas later concocted. And the less said about Brian Herbert's books, the better.
I get why the industry must rehash and fill every possible gap: it makes business sense, and they are risk averse for blockbusters.
But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
> But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
Because it's enjoyable when done well. As a teenager I read LOTR, and noticed all the references to the larger mythos Tolkien had worked on - references to Fëanor, Elbereth, Valinor, and so on. Those were very intriguing, and the greatest joy I've ever had reading a book was when I finally read the Silmarillion and got to see what those things were all about. I concede that filling out the world can be done poorly (though I haven't read the Brian Herbert stuff and can't comment on whether he did a good job). But when done well, it is truly magical to have those elements in the background of the story take on a life and detail of their own.
Good point on Tolkien, though I would argue it's different because the Silmarillion was written for his own satisfaction, not his fans, and actually it was The Lord of the Rings which was initially written as "another Hobbit story" (though the story later "grew in the telling").
I think a more suitable example of what I find annoying is the extra material for the small and big screens, such as The Hobbit movies, suffering from movie elephantiasis; and The Rings of Power, which (over)explain and show the past of characters such as Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron's rise to power, which in my opinion are best left as the ancient past of LotR (and maybe belong in the Silmarillion, but do note the latter is not as expository as the TV show). And does anybody really think The Hunt for Gollum was necessary?
Yet, if they make them, it's because they are sure fans will lap it up. To be honest I consider this need for endless "filling in the gaps" a sign of immaturity.
"Nothing to do" is a bit strong. It has something to do, and the explanation is in the history of how these games worked.
Can it be simulated on GPUs? Sure. But it was typical of software renderers of that era, and NOT typical of GPUs, and it has to do with how they were used.
This is incorrect. It is exactly the same algorithm as circuits in the GPU or as instructions on the CPU. No difference, except one: the way data is pipelined on the GPU makes texture blending free, or nearly so. So to show off, every 3D game back then turned it on (an OpenGL/Glide/D3D configuration option) and everything got smoothed out, often with no option to turn it off. That's why it ends up looking different: because the game itself selected different interpolation in accelerated vs software rendered. It was a game choice.
These days you can use different presets to override those choices, and have your 8K, 240Hz Quake look software rasterized, if you want.
Incorrect how? It's correct in that software renderers of the time TFA describes mostly looked like this, and GPU renderers didn't (of course, they weren't called GPUs back then), and there's a reason for this. Even you admit it later in your comment.
So saying "it has nothing to do" with software renderers (of the time) is wrong. It has something to do with how software renderers vs GPUs were used during that era in practice. It's also true you can simulate one with the other, but that doesn't make it incorrect or unrelated.
> So to show off, every 3D game back then turned it on (an OpenGL/Glide/D3D configuration option) and everything got smoothed out, often with no option to turn it off. That's why it ends up looking different
So it had something to do after all! So TFA has a point. He means software renderers in the sense you're describing here, and it's clear from the text. He's not implying you cannot use a GPU to achieve the same result.
Software renderers can do bilinear filtering. It does not change any aspect of how the software renderer works. I’ve implemented this, so I know: it’s a couple of lines change in the texture lookup. But it adds three lerps per channel, per pixel, whereas nearest neighbor requires none. That’s 9 multiply-adds in the tightest inner loop that would normally have zero. In the 3D accelerators of the era, the pipelines were all fixed-function (programmability is why NVIDIA renamed it GPU when they released the GeForce 256), so those lerps were in the silicon whether you used them or not. Bilinear filtering had zero impact on render speed, so long as you weren’t saturating video RAM with the added texture lookups.
TL;DR a software rendered game and a 3D accelerated game from that era looked VERY different, but that difference was largely down to a feature that was often implemented in the software renderer, and was only a couple of lines in the innermost loop. But rarely used outside of a few choice effects due to the massive performance impacts. On 3D accelerators it was free, and default-on.
(I’m an old fart that cut my teeth in programming writing software renderers with the community at Flipcode, if anyone remembers that.)
I'm not disputing the technical details of anything you're saying. I don't think the author of TFA is, either.
So when you say "this is incorrect", and also:
> Software renderers can do bilinear filtering.
What do you mean? Nobody is disputing they can. The author is talking, in my opinion, about how software and hardware renderers of that time behaved in practice in games you could buy at the time. It's just that peppering the text with "at the time", "typical" and "in practice" makes for very cumbersome reading.
I'm also an old fart, by the way :) I don't remember Flipcode, but I wrote software renderers for fun and also for my CS coursework. I read my Abrash and my Foley & van Dam, etc. I then lost track of that, time was finite and I had to choose my hobbies more carefully!
This is ridiculous. He explained it perfectly and he was right stating that it has "nothing to do with software rendering". The fact that people specifically chose to do it differently on hardware makes nothing about what the article mentions specific to software rendering. Otherwise if you do the smoothing on the CPU you have to call it a hardware renderer now to be consistent.
It's not ridiculous. It's also perfectly clear from TFA, one has to go out of their way to misinterpret this.
E.g.
> Software renderers generally sample textures pixel by pixel, so every texel stays a crisp square. Early 3D cards smoothed textures with bilinear filtering, which looked impressive in 1997 but turns everything soft and blurry to my eye now.
The author is a hobbyist discussing things in context. Early 3D cards, bilinear filtering as done in '97, etc. You cannot take random words and criticize the article. This seems to be a retrogaming hobbyist blog about doing stuff with old hardware and games.
The point is that the look is not inherent to software rendering. You're misinterpreting this as some kind of denial of historical association.
You're own quote there identifies texture filtering as the difference. Explaining that you can get those sharp textures with hardware acceleration, isn’t “pointless nitpicking.”
I don't think anyone (including the original author) is saying that the look is inherent to software renderers. The point being made is that software renders of the day tended to do things in a particular way (because CPU speed was limited), and when some of these games gained hardware renderers, they did things in a different particular way, because more computationally-expensive (for a CPU) blending modes were more or less free on a GPU.
I do agree that the author may have missed the fact that they could have overridden texture blending modes via their GPU driver, and gotten a similar graphical look using the hardware renderer. But even that's a little uncertain; there are some other comments in other subthreads that point out that the hardware rendering modes on many of these older games also did other stuff that wasn't feasible with the software renderer, and those other things sometimes can't be tweaked/disabled. So if your goal is "exact same visual style as the software renderer", you might actually have to use the software renderer.
"Software" isn't the point. You can do the exact same math on CPU or GPU. OpenGL supports nearest neighbor texture filtering on whatever hardware you run it on since 1992, one year before Doom even came out.
But in practice, this didn't happen, which is what TFA seems to be all about. So it's not incorrect to talk about software renderers (of the time) vs hardware accelerated graphics (of the time) and how they were used in practice (at the time). It's just cumbersome to write "at the time", and it's understood from context; at least I did. It also helps to look at the rest of the blog's articles and what the blog is about...
I disagree. The article is making claims about software renderers of the time vs hardware accelerated renderers of the time, as they typically worked. It's missing the point completely to believe the author of a blog seemingly dedicated to old games and old hardware is making a general claim about software renderers and GPUs as understood now. Context matters!
The author didn't qualify every word he wrote with "of the time" and "typically", possibly because he didn't expect their article to be nitpicked on HN, but a cursory reading shows that's what he meant.
I isn't "simulated" by GPUs, it is a rendering mode that GPUs had since before they were called GPUs.
The reason software rendering look different from 3D accelerated games (incl. 3Dfx) is nearest neighbor filtering and low resolution, which were necessary to keep a reasonable framerate. At the time, it was considered ugly, so if your hardware supported bilinear filtering for free, it was turned on, but it didn't have to.
In the time of fixed pipelines (3Dfx to GeForce 3), you couldn't do arbitrary operations on pixels, so some effects, like the kind that are common in the demoscene were software only. So games that used these effects, like Comanche voxels can indeed be thought as representative of software rendering, and they can, of course, be simulated on modern GPUs as everything that was done on software before can.
But the article uses Quake as an example. I may be wrong, but I don't think it does anything that can't be done by a fixed pipeline GPU. In fact, even keeping the same style (nearest neighbor filtering + low resolution), hardware rendering will probably look better because the GPU does proper perspective correction on every pixel. The tricks used by the Quake engine are awesome, but they don't beat raw power.
> I isn't "simulated" by GPUs, it is a rendering mode that GPUs had since before they were called GPUs.
Yes, of course. That's what I meant. I didn't mean "simulate" as in fake, I meant it more as in "replicate the same effect". Ultimately, hardware and software are equivalent, give or take matters of costs, debugging and performance.
> In the time of fixed pipelines (3Dfx to GeForce 3), you couldn't do arbitrary operations on pixels, so some effects, like the kind that are common in the demoscene were software only. So games that used these effects, like Comanche voxels can indeed be thought as representative of software rendering, and they can, of course, be simulated on modern GPUs as everything that was done on software before can.
Yes, I think that's the spirit in which TFA's term "software rendering" must be taken. The context is old games and their pipelines as they were used at the time, not more recent GPUs or practices.
> The tricks used by the Quake engine are awesome, but they don't beat raw power.
I really don't think the article is contesting this.
> This is conflating care that every human can thrive their best with desire to see everyone bound to some dominance strategy of hieratic pissing territory.
This would have more merit if the owners and investors of major AI companies suddenly adopted a philosophy of rejecting private property and capitalism. That way I could believe we can let go of this "dominance strategy of hieratic pissing territory".
But if they don't, and they merely try to convince us that we should let go of the obsession with owning things and getting paid, I'll be suspicious. People who own a lot telling others they shouldn't worry that much about money and owning things.
If Druckenmiller had published his badly-written, poorly articulated opinions, it would have been more valuable. It'd be what he believes, written in the way he can manage to articulate. Maybe we could form an entirely appropriate bad opinion of him and his ideas and writing.
> I'm sure the Telegraph operators, human calculators, mine workers and all sorts of people have asked themselves this question. It's obvious that it feels strange to suddenly be part of the cohort asking but I assure you it's not new. And the answer hasn't changed much since.
I don't buy this argument, much like I don't buy the similar "they said the same when calculators were introduced".
It negates that some changes are qualitatively and scale-wise different. Also, by gradually chipping away at things that humans do, you (we) keep shrinking and shrinking until there's nothing left, every step of the way some people claiming "well, the telegraph operators said the same". Keep in mind that, while it's hyperbole, some AI entrepreneurs are actually saying stuff like "maybe jobs will become a hobby". Unrealistic for now, maybe, but if they do become a hobby, what leverage will we have at all?
In other words, it's true the past is worth keeping in mind, but not to the exclusion of the possibility that this time it's different. Or that the trends of the past actually point to harm in the near future.
> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game...
And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.
"You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game..." Uh, this is exactly what I do. What's so special about an app that launches apps that it needs to be left warm constantly?
Nothing special. It just sits there doing nothing, like many other programs in my setup. Some people start Steam on boot up.
If you don't, nothing special happens either: you just wait 7-10 seconds, hardly an eternity, and there's really no rush to firing up a videogame either. We're not talking in-game responsiveness, the only thing that truly matters.
>You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there.
That's what I do. I don't really care how long it takes to start (within reason), since when I boot my computer I rarely start playing a game right away. I check my mail, then look at the news, and after that decide what I want to play. As long as it doesn't take more than five minutes or so, I won't even notice.
Agreed. But would our AI entrepreneurs, so busy building the Torment Nexus, pay heed?
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