Hehe I guess nobody knows.

It looks like there were at least two things in DirectX (Direct3D) that could be emulated to work. I found these in the D3D.INF for DirectX 5.0.

Ramp Emulation - Microsoft Direct3D Mono(Ramp) Software Emulation
RGB Emulation - Microsoft Direct3D RGB Software Emulation

Maybe if I dig through all the ini files I can get the definitive answer.

squareguy wrote:

Ramp Emulation - Microsoft Direct3D Mono(Ramp) Software Emulation
RGB Emulation - Microsoft Direct3D RGB Software Emulation

Those are reference software renderers that are part of DirectX.

Voodoo1 is definitely Direct3D 5 compliant. Direct3D 5 was a partial overhaul that added the DrawPrimitive API that finally made Direct3D appealing. It also has Voodoo-inspired features like palettized 8-bit textures and table-based fog that were painful for other GPU manufacturers. Direct3D 3 was based on a concept that programmers hated called Execute Buffers. AFAIK, Direct3D 6 added a software T&L engine with SIMD optimizations that apparently few games bothered with, introduced some bump mapping tech, texture compression, stencil + W buffers and multi-texturing support (critical for Voodoo2). None of the pre-D3D 7 chips supported all of that AFAIK. Savage 4 seems most compliant maybe.

In practice what I saw was Voodoo1 became too slow for later Direct3D 6/7 games more than it was lacking the features to render them properly. Its typical 2MB texture memory is a problem among other things like just relatively low fill rate. But you can play complex games like Quake 3 and UT99 fairly well with reduced texture settings.

Thanks swaaye, that answers my question.

You, as always, are awesome