What am I missing here? Why is it cool to not use the fast GPU and instead do everything slow in a software renderer on the CPU? It surely is interesting to do it for the sake of it, but are there any practical use cases?
Then I probably should not have commented here, as I am very practical and l'art pour l'art is not my take. But I hope you had fun and continue to have fun ;)
It's much easier to debug. And CPUs are actually fast enough to do real-time rendering of simple scenes. Because writing for the CPU is so different, and so much easier than writing for the GPU, a pure software stack allows you to explore new ideas.
Well yeah, I remember those software renderer options from old computer games.
I might not have known the difference between GPU and CPU back then, but I learned very quickly that Software renderer means slow and makes your Computer very hot. Not cool (literally) I thought back then.
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And it has shaders. Can't get any cooler
What am I missing here? Why is it cool to not use the fast GPU and instead do everything slow in a software renderer on the CPU? It surely is interesting to do it for the sake of it, but are there any practical use cases?
There's no real practical use case besides just being a fun hobby project
There are some niche cases where software rendering on the CPU is used nowadays but it's pretty rare
There are a lot of optimizations that could be done to make a CPU renderer faster, but even so I don't think there are many real world use cases
Then I probably should not have commented here, as I am very practical and l'art pour l'art is not my take. But I hope you had fun and continue to have fun ;)
It's much easier to debug. And CPUs are actually fast enough to do real-time rendering of simple scenes. Because writing for the CPU is so different, and so much easier than writing for the GPU, a pure software stack allows you to explore new ideas.
Exploring new ideas without worrying about GPUs was exactly one of my motivations :)
Running it remotely on a cloud instance? Or on any machine without a GPU.
Well yeah, I remember those software renderer options from old computer games.
I might not have known the difference between GPU and CPU back then, but I learned very quickly that Software renderer means slow and makes your Computer very hot. Not cool (literally) I thought back then.