Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer

Re:Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer by jayd16 on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @03:21PM (#29489968)

>that's why there is no z-buffer, because it had no z-coordinate

Z-buffer is just an array of values you can sample, often as a texture. There is no inherit coordinates, unlike, say, vertices. Z-buffer is a 2d map anyway. The offset into that buffer would be the x and y.

Or do you just mean there's no hardware accelerated z-buffer?

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Re:Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer by codeflo on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @05:53PM (#29491632)

In early 3D hardware, the Z buffer was a bit more special cased than it is now, where you quite literally allocate a texture. In either case, the interesting (and expensive to emulate in software) part is of course using the depth buffer to perform depth testing, that is, rejecting pixels that would be hidden.

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Re:Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer by jayd16 on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @10:54PM (#29493642)

Sure, the depth was not calculated or tested in hardware. But its not because buffers did not have a z-coordinate.

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