Old school rendering rant - Tomb Raider
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Reinigdavid
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Old school rendering rant - Tomb Raider is a long-form Medium article by Reinig David in a series on late-1990s software rendering techniques.
The post dissects Tomb Raider III on period hardware: grid-based rooms, portal recursion with frustum clipping, distance fog and depth cueing, texture atlases without mipmaps, sky spheres versus baked sky colors, color-key transparency, flip-book animation, and vertex lighting with room lights instead of lightmaps.
It suits intermediate graphics programmers curious about pre-shader engines, software renderers, and occlusion strategies before widespread Z-buffer use.
The article is free to read on Medium with inline pseudocode, screenshots, and references to TRosettaStone format documentation.
It is useful as a concrete case study of how developers traded fill rate, memory, and sorting for playable 3D worlds on Pentium-era PCs.
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