This video and the Portal trailer blew people’s dicks off when they came out, but at least the Portal trailer, younger audiences can see why. So much of HL2’s tech is now ‘Yep, that’s a thing. Was it new?’
If you want the proper contemporary experience, here it is in potato quality, with live commentary.
An audience member jokes “And this’ll run on my 486?” That’s how old the Source engine is, that was a joke that landed.
The industry was so different back then, Unreal Tournament 2004 still shipped with a software renderer.
The industry was so different back then, Michael Abrash documented that renderer’s development in Dr. Dobbs, an actual ink-on-paper journal.
Here’s one thing that hasn’t changed: Intel. This renderer, Pixomatic, was all hand-optimized assembly, from the guy John Carmack hired to outclass him. At one point he realized one instruction in a very tight loop was redundant. Removing it made the loop slower. Which is, in technical terms, some bullshit. Doing less should not take more time. It wasn’t from alignment or cache or pipelines or any sensible cause. Abrash called in favors so he could study the actual traces of the Pentium 4, because he just had to know what the fuck was happening under the hood - and Intel made him sign a stack of NDAs, so we the public will never find out.
