Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld

Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld

Today I want to talk about my journey writing a 3D software renderer for the Playdate.

At the beginning, I didn't have any performance baseline. I had no idea how feasible my idea was, so I started with a simple test: a raycaster.

I had written one many years ago, based on the code examples from Ken Silverman's webpage, and since then it has basically become what I write whenever I want to test the 3D processing power and screen drawing performance of a low-power device.

You don't need much to write, compile, and run this kind of test, and it gives you a rough idea of the device's processing power. More specifically, it lets you benchmark the areas that matter most for a 3D renderer: how fast it handles floats and vector math, how fast it performs memory operations, how quickly it can draw to the screen, and whether there are any issues with setting up and using a framebuffer.

The initial results were worse than I expected. The performance was bad enough that it became clear this was not going to be an easy project.

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