That's not the point, Traveler - it's just a fun thing to do .

It is possible to get good results for software renderers, but it's quite difficult. There's a bloke who hangs around gamedev as "c0d1f1ed" (or something like that) and as "Nick" over at Flipcode. He's heavily into this stuff and has a Quake 3 renderer with bilinear filtering, per-pixel mipmapping and all sorts of crazy stuff (in crazily optimized assembly, though). Also, a sofware renderer has been released for Unreal Tournament 2003(!).

Software rendering ain't gonna be nearly as fast as hardware for quite a while, but it's fun! In a few generations time we'll have CPUs that are meaty enough to do this sort of thing without problems.

Also: nice work peterbone.

EDIT: moved to Your Projects forum.