"It would be impossible since pixel shaders didn't exist until the 2000's ;-)"
Lmao. You got me there.
"Just turn it into a function and call it for every pixel on the screen. Making it fast is another matter altogether though."
I was imagining it took up many MB of memory and massive cycles even on a multicore CPU. Suddenly, one faces tough decisions about organization, resolution, primitives, techniques used, algorithms, and so on. Gets really, really hard to make tiny and fast stuff without that GPU doing heavy lifting. :)
A soft renderer wouldn't fit in 4096 bytes, too. The overwhelming preference of the demoscene when doing PC filesize compos is to lean on OS provisions in order to free up space for more algorithms. Hence you have demos that use files in C:\Windows as source data. Likewise, you have demos for older computers that require aftermarket RAM upgrades and employ preprocessing techniques that require modern computing resources. In unrestricted compos modern game engines get employed these days, too, and while many of those entries suffer the downside of having a low entry bar, good work has been made too.
Pointing at the GPU as a particular cheat or a make-easy button is not relevant to the conversation, in this light. Having a Gravis Ultrasound was also a cheat back in the day ;) It's all fairly arbitrary stuff, and in the end, the point is to present something cool running on the hardware and within the nominal restrictions, even if you get tricky to do so.
"It's all fairly arbitrary stuff, and in the end, the point is to present something cool running on the hardware and within the nominal restrictions, even if you get tricky to do so."
Another good, detailed perspective on it. Appreciate it. I'll especially agree with the part I quoted. :)
Lmao. You got me there.
"Just turn it into a function and call it for every pixel on the screen. Making it fast is another matter altogether though."
I was imagining it took up many MB of memory and massive cycles even on a multicore CPU. Suddenly, one faces tough decisions about organization, resolution, primitives, techniques used, algorithms, and so on. Gets really, really hard to make tiny and fast stuff without that GPU doing heavy lifting. :)