The Computer Graphics Library

Here's a rather impressive software renderer that does per-pixel Phong shading and shadow mapping (among other things): http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/renderer.html

You might also want to look into Ingo Wald's thesis on realtime ray tracing. In a ray tracing tutorial Jacco Bikker wrote that Wald is reporting speeds of several frames per second for scenes consisting of thousands of polygons at a resolution of 1024x768 pixels, on a single 2.5Ghz laptop. That was written ten years ago, in 2004.

p.s. why are you doing any matrix multiplies in a shader? i guess these are per-pixel? per-vert? even per-vert ones can be removed or reduced if you don't mind a little loss of generality and have e.g fixed view point or a non-rotating teapot ;)

edit: as a note the teapot mesh is a bit squashed - this was originally such an optimisation. it was originally meant to be rendered rotating around the vertical axis on a 4:3 display, so the teapot mesh has been deformed 3:4 where 3 is the vertical and 4 are the two horizontal axes... this saves the aspect ratio correcting multiply when its rendered out.

i'm generally of the opinion though that 'we' have lost a lot of knowledge.

Yes, that is kind of what I meant. I know there are still people doing software rendering, and I know it's sometimes used to complement GPU based rendering. And there are interesting projects out there. So, not quite dead, and I'm not even going to say yet because I don't think it's dying at all, on the contrary.

Still though the "state of art" has by and large ignored software for so many years now, with almost all advances and techniques being primarily done on the GPU (sometimes with help from the CPU).

So I totally agree we've lost knowledge. I personally hope to regain that knowledge, maybe come up with something new, perhaps even push some boundaries... but we'll see. :-)

Thank you for the link.