The Total Annihilation graphics engine was developed before hardware acceleration was widely available. The engine used a mix of fixed and floating-point math, with some assembly code optimizations. Due to the 8-bit palette limitation, various tricks like lookup tables were used for effects like alpha blending and shadows. To improve performance, unit rendering was optimized by caching 3D models as sprites and using z-buffering for self-intersection. This article continues to go through the various innovations of the graphics engine back then.