Dear God, the solution is insane! That is mind-blowing... emulating the whole pipeline?!?!

People who do emulation are, quite simply, the very, very best of us.

My other take away is: just don't bother getting an Nvidia card if you can avoid it.

No, not really. It's not hard to write a graphics pipeline emulator. Those who believe a software rasterizer is difficult simply haven't spent much time trying to write one.

Making it correct is much more difficult than making it at all. I'd be shocked if their emulator got the basics correct in every detail. Example: Texture wrapping occurs by taking the UV texcood modulo the texture size. But since a texcoord can be negative, your modulo operation has to account for that at the boundary between positive and negative, or else you end up with truncated texels.

It doesn't sound like they were really writing a rasterizer, but it's the same concept.

I guess I'm one of those :-) I still have massive respect for these guys.

Yeah, I didn't mean to minimize the achievement. I just meant if you're interested, you should try it! It's fun.